Fuddland

Despite my previous irritations, I’ve upgraded to the latest version of MT. Since they’ve introduced comment throttling, I’ve also added Distler’s comment-, trackback- and search-throttling patches. If you submit a comment and realise as soon as you hit ‘Post’ that you wanted to say something else, you need to wait 20 seconds before you can submit another comment. The full constraints are:

1. No more than 1 comment from any given IP address every 20 seconds;

2. 8 comments from the same IP address in less than 200 seconds will get you banned;

3. No more than 20 comments [trackbacks], in total, per hour;

4. No more than 100 comments [trackbacks], in total, per day.

Those last two measures are necessary because comment and trackback spammers and crapflooders can easily spoof their IP addresses, so the first two tactics alone are not enough.

[Incidentally, I’m not really all that keen on the term “crapflooder”, but it seems to have caught on — these are people who don’t spam comments with the usual goal (that of increasing the PageRank of their dodgy website), but just hit it with hundreds of nonsense comments for the sake of causing the owner of the weblog a lot of bother by having to delete them. Nice huh?]

If you’re using MT and want to do the same, rather than hopping around trying to follow the instructions for those three throttling patches, read Shelley’s instructions instead, they’re very clearly written.

#1

Daisy | 2004 / 02 / 02 – 16:19

I don’t know if it’s deliberate (or just me) but I can’t add a comment to the last post (javascript geekery). And now I’ve no idea what I was going to say…

#2

David | 2004 / 02 / 02 – 16:36

Re #1: Oops, sorry. Not just you and not deliberate — just an over-zealous CloseComments plugin. I’ve adjusted the settings and re-opened the comments. Now you just have to remember what it was you were going to say. :)

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