Author Banning in MovableType

I use MovableType 3.1 and it has a decent feature of IP banning. Problem is, comment spammers change IP addresses very quickly. I needed another tool in the battle against the rising tide of spam.

I basically copied the Ban IP functionality, renamed any reference of IP to author and voila: MT_authorban is born!

The functionality works for me but because I had to make changes to a number of the core files, any upgrade will overwrite what I've done. Feel free to download MT_authorban. I'll let the MT crew in on what I've done and maybe they'll integrate it into 3.2. :)

To install the update, just unzip the files and upload into your movabletype directory (normally /mt/). Just overwrite the files that are already there. Don't forget to make a backup of the stuff on the server first! I'd hate for this to mess up your configuration.

Leave a comment if you end up using it. Thanks!

Published November 11, 2004 · Updated September 17, 2005
Categorized as CMS
Short URL: https://snook.ca/s/282

Conversation

3 Comments · RSS feed
1
Gabriel Mihalache said on November 11, 2004

I'd rather teach MT-Blacklist that comments containing that name are to be denied :-)

Anyway, who prevents your bad visitors from slightly altering their name? Like 'Gabri3l' or something like that?

2
Jonathan Snook said on November 11, 2004

But changing your name defeats the whole purpose of comment spamming: to drive results to your page based on link popularity on a keyword. If they start making up words then they can't build any popularity on that keyword.

I had originally started modifying the MT-DSBL plugin to do author name checking but decided I didn't want to embark on building an interface for adding new keywords. Thus, I hacked the MT source instead. :)

3
Tom said on March 07, 2006

I really enjoy reading your articles. Keep up the great work.
TBoardenson

Sorry, comments are closed for this post. If you have any further questions or comments, feel free to send them to me directly.