Plug it in, plug it in …

Did some long-overdue playing around with Movable Type plug-ins today. (And, no, I haven’t upgraded to 3.3 yet, nor have I solved the MT-Notifier problems, so shut up.) Two worked brilliantly, one did not.

DuplicatedTBPingLookup: This plug-in supposedly flags as junk (and thus removes) trackbacks that are duplicates of previously received trackbacks. That would be handy here, since my system has a tendence to generate double or triple TBs to posts that link to other internal posts. Unfortunately, the darned thing triggered off my AutoBan plug-in,
which bans IP addresses (temporarily) that generate junk items. I still have a need for something like this, and I think this is still a pretty keen way to do it, it just required more configuration than I could afford to give it.

TinyTuring: Essentially generates a text-based, single-letter CAPTCHA-like test. Nice. I really needed this for BD, whose blog has its own domain, but who is hosted here and points to the Hill-Kleerup.org MT installation — which causes Internet Explorer fits whenever the TypeKey
registration sets cookies. Bleah. So instead, he’s been handling comment moderation for all non-TypeKey users. This will hopefully get around this, and let non-TypeKey users post comments immediately. I also implemented it (as a test) on Blog of Heroes, and am going to keep it in place there.

I’m not going to implement it on this blog yet, though. Two reasons. First, I like the TypeKey thang, and haven’t gotten any complaints about it. Second, my templates are a huuuuuge mess (having gone through years of tweaking and modifying from very crude beginnings) and trying to insert one more piece into it is a risk I don’t want to take unless I have to. And fixing MT Notifier comes first. 😛

DefineCommentPending: This plug-in solves a strange problem. When MT introduced moderation for comments, it started pointing toward a Comment Pending Template for certain error/status messages. New blogs created got that template, and some older blogs did during upgrades, too — but some did not. As a result, moderation leads to a bizarro error page that chides the user for not
having a Comment Pending Template. And, apparently, there’s no way to create one from scratch.

This plug-in … well, it makes one for any blogs that need it in your install. I used it on one blog, and it worked like a champ. An excellent little tool.