***Dave asked the question about what to do with blog spamming. So far, blacklist management has been the only answer. I have a solution that unless the spammer is very persistant he will have to manually enter comments on your blog.
First you will need to create a spam trap blog. Create an entry that will accumulate spam messages. Look at the source of that entry and write down the entry_id. The HTML will look like this:
<input type="hidden" name="entry_id" value="398723987" />
This ID will become the entry_id for all your comment forms. For my examples this will be spam_id. Replace spam_id with the number of the spam blog entry. New lines in the examples below will be in bold and modified lines will be in italic.
For MT blogs you will need to create a new index template with the file name obscure_script_name.js. In this template you will put the following code:
function doLoaded1 () {
document.comments_form.entry_id.value = obscure_variable_name;
}
onload = doLoaded1;
For the individual archive itself:
<head>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<$MTBlogURL$>obscure_file_name.js"></script>
</head>
...
<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
...
var HOST=....
var obscure_variable_name = '<$MTEntryID$>';
...
<form ...>
<input type="hidden" name="entry_id" value="spam_id" />
For Typepad the obscure_file_name.js template changes slightly to this:
function doLoaded1 () {
if (!document.comments_form) return;
setFormValues(document.comments_form);
if (document.comments_form.author.value)
document.comments_form.bakecookie.checked = 1;
document.comments_form.entry_id.value = obscure_variable_name;
}
onload = doLoaded1;
The individual archives look like this:
...
<head>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<$MTStaticWebPath$>comments.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="<$MTBlogURL$>obscure_file_name.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
hostName = '<$MTBlogHost$>';
obscure_variable_name = '<$MTEntryID$>';
</script>
</head>
...
<form ...>
<input type="hidden" name="entry_id" value="spam_id" />
Further cloaking can be done by having a .php program generate the javascript. To see how innocuous this looks, click on the permalink of this post and show the HTML source.
