Tuesday Evening Hackapalooza
Charles Johnson
Tue Jan 1, 2008 at 5:44 pm PST • Views: 305
Michael J. Totten has been having a whole lot of trouble at his site, with nasty trolls and spam attacks, because he was using an ancient version of Movable Type that didn’t allow for commenter authentication—a relic from the blogosphere’s golden era, when comment trolls were rarely seen. In today’s tougher age, we need more defenses against the brainlessly persistent creeps, bots, and freaks of the intarwebs.
So I’ve been lending a hand today and upgrading Michael’s blog to the latest version of Movable Type, now an open source application with some nice enhancements—and most important from Michael’s harassed point of view, the ability to allow comments only from registered Typekey users, who can also be easily blocked if need be.
Converting his version 2 templates to version 4 with the Typekey authentication code was an interesting piece of surgery. We’re still testing it now, and if you’ve wondered why posting was a bit light today, there’s your answer…
But I also see that thanks to our new spinoff links, and the lizard army, there’s been plenty of interesting stuff to read around here…
Frank says: