What Say You?
I’ve finally put in place some long-needed enhancements to my comment system. First, and most importantly, all new comments are timestamped, and timestamps display with the comments. This should help with context when reading comments. In addition, each “writeback” (Blosxom nomenclature for a comment or trackback) is now tagged as either a comment or a trackback.
In addition, there’s a couple of behind-the-scenes changes. In additon to timestamps, I’m now recording IP address with each comment. This is only for use if in the event of comment spam; granted, there’s little change of that on this blog, but might as well be proactive. Also, I’ve added a notification to the comment system so I’ll get emailed when new comments appear.
Big thanks to Fletcher T. Penny, who has authored many plugins for Blosxom, and improved many others. I’m using his modified version of Rael’s writeback plugin to provide the timestamp and IP logging. I borrowed the email notification code from Scott Fallin’s writeback_notify. This is all code I’ve been meaning to write, and haven’t had the time. Another reason to love Blosxom: Community.
So, click the link below and give it a try. What say you?
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
An example comment
Complete with timestamp.
Keyword Filtering of Comments
I’ve done some work on modifying the writeback plugin myself to allow for keyword filtering of comments. Basically it just rejects a comment that uses a blacklisted set of keywords. I think it’s a lot more effective than blocking on IP address. I’ve also written a little utility for cleaning out unwanted writebacks from your site. Since “good” writebacks and “bad” writebacks are all in the same text file on the server you can’t just remove them. This script helps with that. Just thought you might want to know… Hope you don’t consider this “comment spam”. I guess it’s more like “blog whoring” (advertising my own site on your blog). At least I’m on topic. :-)