I spent about an hour today upgrading to the latest version of Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist plugin and despamming my blogs of the 1000+ items that infested it.

It's nice, and has already caught a bunch of spam for me, but a strange error resulted my having to manually delete a bunch of comments using the native Movable Type interface.

A few things I noticed that would make the Movable Type user experience much nicer:

• Provide a filter to show pending comments only. Deleting a comment or set of comments is the main task accomplished by a user on the comments listing page. Since it's highly unlikely that a user would want to delete a comment that has already been approved, there should be an option to filter approved comments from being listed on this page. This way, a user can click the Check All button and then the Delete button without having to uncheck approved comments that a user likely doesn't want to delete.
• Persist the "Comments Displayed" setting across form posts. To delete as many spam comments in one go as possible, I set the number of comments per page to 125. After deleting comments, the number of comments displayed per page defaults back to 20. Changing back to 125 requires a page reload--very annoying. If a preference is exposed to the user, it should persist across trips to the server.
• Show the total number of comments, and where I am in that list. For example, if I'm viewing comments 126-250 of 1000, it would be great to have a virtual signpost to let me know that.

After brute-forcing the deletion of 1k+ spams, and cleaning out my GMail inbox of the corresponding comment notifications, I feel like a load has been lifted off my shoulders. I think it's the sick information junkie in me that delights in seeing a nice (0) beside my inbox, and only approved comments in Movable Type.

Whatever it is, I feel like I have more energy to devote to creation of stuff now that I've taken care of a significant maintenance issue.

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