Has it ever occurred to anyone to develop an “MT-Whitelist” as a different approach to comment spam than Jay Allen’s excellent MT-Blacklist? As the name suggests, MT-Whitelist would only allow approved URLs to be posted in the comments section of your blog. You could begin with a starter batch of okey-doke URLs and then, with each comment using a new URL, you could choose to add new ones to your list (or not). Given the relatively limited number of different commenters the vast majority of blogs attract, this might be a pretty simple answer to the comment spam problem.
(Yes, it’s Friday night, and I’m at home writing about comment spam solutions. But I can be wild and crazy, too: I just got home from a shopping spree at the book store. My life is a nonstop party.)
Well, it appears that once Google indexes this page, I will have ruined a perfectly good Googlewhack.
George, perhaps I’m being dim, but wouldn’t a “whitelist” prevent new commenters from coming on board?
(re. the name: I’m thinking of Raffi’s version of “Baa baa black sheep”: the second verse is
“Baa baa white sheep, have you any wool?”
“Yes M’am, yes M’am, three bags full,
One for the lady and one for the man,
And one for the little girl who lives down the lane.”
“Baa baa white sheep, have you any wool?”
“Yes M’am, yes M’am, three bags full.”)
In this hypothetical situation, they could leave comments but their URLs would not show up until you approved them.
Ah. That sounds excellent. Thanks for the explanation.
You probably know this already, but MT 3.0, which is about to roll into beta testing, has this feature, or its cousin. See: this description of the new commenting functionality.
I had read about that, Jason. I imagined this as a somewhat less labor-intensive process for the reader/commenter. But the more I think about it, the less I’m sure the whitelist is such a good idea. The number of prohibited URLs is always going to be so much smaller than the number of innocuous ones.