MT 2.66 upgrade

Six Apart releases Movable Type 2.66 which brings new features to protect a weblog against comments spamming:

• a throttling measure so that comments from the same IP address can only be posted every N seconds
• a measure to automatically ban an IP address based on an abnormal number of comments from the same address in a short period of time
• new behavior of <$MTCommentAuthorLink$> to use redirects when linking to URLs given in comments. The goal of this is to defeat the PageRank boost given to spammers by posting in the comments on a weblog (but too bad it doesn't extend to URLs present within the comment itself. Expect all comment spammers to move their URLs into the comment body soon

Six Apart also advise to close old comment threads. I've never liked this line of defense for two reasons: it prevents legitimate comments on old entries (and I've got a few ones that are worth more than ten times their weight of spam, so I'm only closing comments on entries that get regularly spammed based on specific keywords), and I have the intuition that it will only make spammers start commenting on new entries.

But for those who want or need to close old comments automatically on an MT weblog, here are a few scripts:

• MT-close from David Raynes
• A perl script from David Sifry (he advises to run it every hour but I don't see the need for more than once a day)
• blog_close_comments.pl from Jeremy Zawodny
• Close comments from Geeksblog (PHP script, for a MySQL-driven MT)