Mostly Harmless

That comment queue hack, is “TEH Shit.”

Total comments blocked so far: 183. Go peddle your online casinos elsewhere.
Total comments blocked so far: 187. (yes, they tried 4 while I was adding up the last batch)

Since I haven’t implemented a blacklist or all the other spam reduction methods (yet) I still get comment spam attempts that I have to deal with in the comment queue. When they dump 20-30 messages at a time it becomes tedious to deny each of those individually — the fancier SQL version may have a nice way to deal with that sort of thing but the Perl hack doesn’t didn’t.

My version of the comment queue hack has an extra subroutine to delete all the pending comments. That lets me “allow” the one legitimate comment, for instance, and then “deny” all the rest with just one click of the spiffy new button:

I’m only posting my changes, instead of the whole file, because this is a hack of a hack and I’ve only got a vague understanding of the script, so you should only muck with this if you know your way around Perl and MT.

Anywho, here’s the gist…

In sub init update the methods:

$app->add_methods (
   list => \&list,
   allow => \&allow,
   deny => \&deny,
   denyall => \&denyall,
);

In sub list add the new button:

...
require MT::Entry;

$html .= "<table>\n";
$html .= "<td><form method='post' action='".$app->uri."'>\n";
$html .= "<input type='hidden' name='__mode' value='denyall'>\n";
$html .= "<input type='submit' value='Deny All Remaining Comments'></form></td></tr>\n";
$html .= "</table>\n";

foreach my $c (@comments) {
...

Add a new subroutine:

sub denyall {
my ($app) = @_;

my $html = "<P>Whacking all pending comments!</p>";

require MT::Comment;
my @comments = MT::Comment->load ({ entry_id => '0' }) or return $html."<p>No pending comments found.</p>";
return $html."<p>No pending comments.</p>" if (!scalar (@comments));
require MT::Blog;
require MT::Entry;

foreach my $c (@comments) {
   my $e = MT::Entry->load ($c->temp_entry_id) or next;
   my $b = MT::Blog->load ($c->blog_id) or next;
   my $id = $c->id;
   my $cx = MT::Comment->load ($id) or return "Cannot find comment";
   $cx->remove or return "Error deleting comment";
   $html .= "Removed comment from ".$cx->author."<br />\n";
}

$html;

}

That should do it. Make a point of renaming the script, or otherwise protect access to it, lest the spammers start authorizing their own spam.

Total comments blocked so far: 203

Update, 5 minutes later…
Well… Son of a B!

Beth at IDblog added the exact same feature, with no extraneous code (unlike mine), mere days before I did my version.

Turns out you don’t need the extra MT::Entry and MT::Blog crap in the denyall subroutine — I suspected that but I just stopped futzing when the code was functional… I copied the “list” code and removed stuff, as opposed to copying the “deny” code and adding a loop.