URLTitles
Comments: 12
In an effort to combat comment spam, Movable Type started masking the URLs of comment writers through a redirection mechanism. While fighting spam is good, this meant that you could no longer see the URL in the browser’s status bar when mousing over a writer’s name, which was not so good.
Tom Werner has written a clever MT plug-in called URLTitles that provides an elegant solution by including the writer’s URL in the title attribute of the link. Mousing over the name should cause your browser to display the URL in one of those little tool-tip boxes that hover near the pointer wherever title attributes are found.
Simply download, decompress, throw it in your plug-ins directory, rebuild the entries, and you’re done. Very nice indeed.
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Posted to MetaStuff • 2004.05.17 (Mon) • 15:46
Comments
Posted by Chris Vincent 2004.05.17, 16:55
Posted by UltraBob 2004.05.17, 18:01
That is what has been keeping me from updating Movable Type as I considered that a rather large usability downgrade. I’ll have to take a look at what versions of Movable Type are available now, and whether I can get in on some of their additional anti-spam capabilities.
Posted by Johan Svensson 2004.05.17, 19:23
That has been one of my major gripes against recent MT versions. I understand the purpose of masking the URL (shakes fist at spammers), but if that actually makes it harder for us non-spammers with the customary amount of brain cells and testicles to actually see where the link leads to. And if it makes it harder for normal users, it defeats its purpose.
Posted by Scott Johnson 2004.05.18, 04:05
In general, I’m not a big fan of MT’s URL masking. I have a plugin installed on my site that disables it, reverting back to the MT 2.64 standard behavior. But this plugin certainly makes the masking MUCH more tolerable.
Posted by Jay Allen 2004.05.18, 11:45
First off, I really can’t stand the redirection in 2.6. Having just been in the position to rely on my referrer logs in order to find all of the places where my misanthropic doppelganger was slandering my good name via impersonation, I cannot tell you how many links I clicked on just to be redirected to my own site. Ridiculous.
It’s the first this I turn off when I install 2.6 (i.e. no_redirect=”1”).
Now, if I remember correctly, MT 3.0D DOES put the actual URL in the title attribute, which is nice. However that doesn’t fix my problem.
For the most part, all that needs to be done is to enable two-way redirection. Barring the cases when someone has their referrers blocked or turned off, all that MT needs to do is to check the referrer. If it’s an internal referrer, you redirect them to the comment author’s site. If it’s an external URL, you redirect them in to the comment.
It’s totally do-able since the commentid is linked to both the entryid and the commenter’s URL.
In fact, I’m going to put this as a feature request in Mantis… Dammit…
Posted by Chris Vincent 2004.05.18, 15:50
Jay, I definitely feel you on that call. Going through referrer logs and hitting your own site again is not monkey sugar in the least. The possible solution you’ve given seems like it would work fine to me.
We must keep in mind, of course, that Six Apart did just kind of fudge this feature in really fast to help the fight against comment spam, so a few small overlooks aren’t unexpected.
Posted by gleek 2004.05.18, 23:56
well, i have had no problems with the older version of MT (2.x version) and MT-Blacklist working together to give me good control over my comment system. i find that spammers are starting to leave me alone because they get denied so many times. i’m not a huge fan of the redirecting because of the referrer logs as well. it seems a bit of an overkill to be redirecting every commenter’s link if i’ve already approved them through MT-Blacklist.
Posted by Jay Allen 2004.05.19, 12:01
Oh, Chris, I understand too well about cobbling together solutions in the face of massive spam attacks. :-)
FWIW, I submitted a feature request to 6A. Ezra, the lead developer liked my idea and said that it was possible to do.
gleek, I totally agree. And besides, I clean up spam that does get through within minutes unless I’m sleeping and Googlebot doesn’t love me THAT much…
Posted by Chris Vincent 2004.05.19, 14:44
Of course! :)
Posted by Jim 2004.05.20, 15:19
Jeremy - Your post reminded me of something that I was working on for something else: Why not use the standard redirect link, but write the link in your templates so that it adds: onmouseover=’link.href=[the real link]’
When the typical user goes to click, it looks and behaves like a normal, direct link. Those with JavaScript turned off get the redirect script, and with the various bots that index your site get the redirect script as well, denying a linkspammer any benefit in their Google rankings or whatever.
I’ll probably implement this, but I’m using a handrolled redirect hack I wrote a long time ago that’s a bit wonky in its link building…
Posted by prem 2004.05.20, 21:34
maybe you should join us at WordPress www.wordpress.org
Posted by Mark 2006.01.10, 12:19
I personally feel that a person should post a message which is relevant to the topic. If they do, then they should be rewarded for their input, with a link. However, the link shouldn’t be related to the topic discussed. That would deplete your blogs status online, I feel. Mark
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