Greasemonkey and MT

I hate comment spam as much as the next guy, so I was surprised when I found out a vacant blog on my system became a giant spam farm over the past few months. I hadn’t seen the site in months so when I logged in to check on a configuration, I noticed all the recent trackbacks and comments were for the old standbys of the spam world. Luckily, I had installed the nofollow plugin months ago, so they weren’t getting any benefit, but it still hurt to know that I was hosting approximately 3k spam comments and trackbacks.

I killed all trackbacks by selecting them on the all trackback page and de-selecting the 4 or 5 legit ones. The list all comments page was too large and I was getting errors deleting them in a huge batch of 2500 at once.

I figured out a workaround using a handy greasemonkey script. Using checkrange I could go to the edit screen for an entry, select the most recent spam comment, then scroll down to shift-click the very first spam.

With all of them selected, I could wipe them out in one go.

It would have been easier if the edit entry pages had a “select all” link, but it’s nice to know the all-purpose greasemonkey tool is there to fill the voids (I could have made a custom script to add the check all link to the MT admin, but this was already written and easy).

In other news, I recently upgraded to the new MT 3.16 version, which seemed to fix a lot of little problems here on the site. One of the big ones was a problem using TypeKey for comments. It seems to be good now which means I’ll be opening comments on posts from time to time. I got a lot of email on the ajax post from yesterday, so I’ve turned comments on for it. Now I just need to finish moving the rest of the site to a new template.