Two (quickie) Comment + TrackBack Anti-Spam Hacks

I got distracted by finishing the tutorial on 3 column layouts and haven't had a chance to try out the new anti-spam hacks yet today. In lieu of a detailed tutorial, here's a couple quick links for those of you who would like to get started already.

Bud has posted a brilliant Hack for turning off comments or Trackbacks site-wide which does not require
advanced templates. That means that yes, anyone can make this one work. Actually, Bud did such a good job writing this up that I think pointing you his way is sufficient.

The equally brilliant but totally different Hack suggested by Craig McGinty is discussed in the comments of Neville Hobson's blog, here. I'm going to play around a bit with this one and write up a more detailed description of it soon. But if you are comfortable with working from a sketch, what Craig suggests is removing the comment field code from the advanced templates:

Delete this <$MTWeblogIncludeModule module=”comment-form”$> and republish, and you should have a spam-free blog.

I want to do a little detail work and make sure existing comments remain, etc. I won't probably get to it until tomorrow evening or the next day. If Craig (or anyone else) has time to do some testing and file a report before then (for both comments and trackbacks) that's be great. If not, I'll get to it as soon as I can.

Tags: typepad, comments, spam, commentspam, trackbacks, trackbackspam