Clubbed by my own club

For the last month or so, the commenting feature on my moblog has not worked, and several readers have emailed me over that time to let me know about it (very much appreciated, folks). When trying to comment on a moblog post, users would get one of those unbecoming “Internal Server Error” messages that needless to say didn’t leave a very good impression, to say nothing of the frustration readers must have felt after spending the time to craft a comment in vain.

However, for the life of me I couldn’t understand why they weren’t working, especially when comments to this site were working just fine. As I’m running both blogs off of one Movable Type (MT) installation, both sites were using the same mt-comments.cgi script. My host doesn’t offer support for cgi scripts that are not part of their standard package, so I was on my own, although they did provide me with access to the server error logs.

The error messages referenced a certain file called postproc.pm related to an MT plug-in I use, so naturally I figured the error was related to that file, but in the end, dealing with that file didn’t fix the problem. Then last night, after scrutinizing the mt-comments.cgi file and in particular the line of code on which the script was “dying,” I had an epiphany and I realized what the problem was. It wasn’t related to the postproc.pm file at all, that was just a red herring. The problem was due to my own haste in dealing with another problem altogether.

A bit over a month ago, after receiving some comments to this site that were of an obvious spam nature, I looked about for some type of solution to this problem, and found Burningbird‘s Comment Spam Quick Fix, which involves adding a field to one’s comment form, as well as some lines of code to the mt-comments.cgi script. I edited my comment forms for this site, but like a bonehead I never did the same thing for the moblog, and thus the comments cgi script was dying whenever anyone tried to comment on the moblog. In essence, my attempt to foil spammers ended up foiling everyone.

Shortly after Burningbird posted her quick fix, which she admitted wasn’t fancy and would only “keep out the lightweights,” Mark Pilgrim wrote a post about possible solutions to the spam problem in an piece entitled Club vs. Lojack solutions, wherein he proffered up the analogy that solutions like Burningbird’s were akin to using the The Club to protect your car against theft. They may deflect spam, or defer it, but long-term they won’t be very effective against actually decreasing it. I had read Mark’s post but still went ahead with the quick fix, figuring that while his long-term thinking was all well and good, Nigerians were about to spam my comments. As it turns out, my haste to use The Club solution kept not only the spammers at bay, but my own readers as well.