Spam management in Movable Type 4

We currently have comments on most of the Daily News blogs set to accept both "anonymous" comments -- meaning from just about anybody -- as well as Typekey-authenticated comments. And we haven't yet made the move to Movable Type-authenticated comments (see -- you have a lot of choices in MT 4 ... and while confusing, it's nice to have options), but that's where it's going, I'm told.

I was about to turn off anonymous comments, but then I got a sweet Distrowatch link about a week ago, bringing quadruple to quintuple the usual traffic, and I didn't want to shut potential commenters out.

I realize that many people might not want to sign up with Typekey, and entering a comment while logged into the Typekey system is confusing (the name, e-mail address and url boxes remain after you're logged in, but they SHOULDN'T BE filled out), and I'm pretty much waiting for the Web-biggies here to get the Movable Type login comments working.

So I decided to try adjusting the spam filter once again. Under Preferences -- Blog Settings, click on Spam, and see what your spam filter is set at. All of ours default to 0. I started with +4, but that caught too many legitimate comments, and I finally settled on +3. That flags most of the spam as spam, which I have set to delete when it gets 5 days old. That way I can quickly scan the spam to see if any legitimate entries got caught in the filter. But I don't have to do anything to the 99.99 percent of spam comments that I don't want on the system -- they just go away when they reach the age of 5 days.

So far, the only spam to get through has been these weird Obama entries that don't have a URL embedded in the comment (unlike 99.999 percent of the other spam). I suppose that the only problem is that "real" commenters who include URLs of any kind in their comments might not make it past the filter, but that's why I quickly scan the spam (Under Manage -- Comments, click on Spam Comments on the right side of the screen to see them -- and make sure you have your "view" set up for 100 rows with "action" buttons enabled on top and bottom, so you can restore/delete at the top or bottom of the long list).

And anybody who absolutely, positively must put URLs in their comment can sign up with Typekey and leave an "authenticated" comment. Right now, those go right through (though that parameter is also modifiable in MT 4).

I no longer spend a considerable chunk of time marking comments in "nonspam comments" as the spam they truly are. The easy change in spam-filter from 0 to +3 has taken care of it for me.