Nice to see a great idea revisited for MT 3+ users. I have BlogJanitor installed but have not noticed any entries in the activity log for closing comments. Is there a way to verify Blog Janitor is working correctly?

I like the plugin, but have a feature request: would it be possible to have an exempt feature for specific entries? I'm using an entry as my contact form versus formmail or email link (both of which, no matter how secure a formmail script i've used I get harvested). Thinking the comment feature is a safer (x email spam) way for a contact feature, but Blog Janitor will at some point keep closing that entry.

Interesting suggestion, Gary. I will have that some thought, as implementing that might be tricky.

FYI, another option for a contact form is my Entry Post plugin. In additon to letting visitors post entries, you can also configure it as a contact form, and it works great. It never publishes email address. See example here.

Thanks, Mark. Entry Post plugin looks like it would work well for the contact form idea + have other value.

I looked through the description and the only question I have is whether the notification email is buried in the form via a hidden input field, of it's somewhere off-page in the scripts. ?

Gary,

The notification email is never hidden in the form -- never "on-page". You can set a notification email address in the plugin settings, OR specify an author_id in a hidden form field, and the email will get sent to the email address of that author (as set in their MT user profile). The latter option is useful for multi-author blogs, and you want visitors to contact a specific author.

Mark, this is a great plugin! I'm just starting to use it and have run into an issue. The following error comes up about 10 times in each of my 15-minutely cron logs.

Use of uninitialized value in string eq at (path to MT)/plugins/BlogJanitor/BlogJanitor.pl line 82.

Any idea what could be causing this? My activity log says that BJ is checking duplicates just fine, but the duplicate check/deletion times correspond closely to the times of my cron outputs.

Also, BJ has left many of my old entries' comments and trackbacks open even though I've set it to close them 45 days after publication. Is there any way for me to force BJ to close comments, or to otherwise check that it's doing this appropriately/correctly?

Many thanks for your great work on this essential plugin.

Forgot to add - I only have 200 entries on my blog, so I don't think that the janitor is getting tired from closing so many entries at once. Thanks!!!

Hi Kelly,

Regarding the first issee (uninitialized value), that sounds like a warning, and not an error. Meaning, its probably still working as desired. That said, I would like to avoid such warnings. Question: how many trackbacks do you have in the blog(s) in question?

Regarding comments are trackbacks not be closed on "some" of your older entries, that does seem odd. Is there any pattern to what gets closed at what doesn't? For example, are they in a certain date-range, or does it seem random? I tried about 25 entries from your site, from 2003, 2004, and 2005, and the comments are closed on all of them.

Hi Mark - thanks for your response; sorry to be tardy in my reply.

It now seems like the closure of comments and trackbacks on old entries is working as planned - I tried numerous entries from as recently as February 2007 and they're closed. Yay! I initially thought they weren't closing because I kept getting trackback spam on 2006 entries which should have been closed.

The site has 5 valid trackbacks. I last received trackback spam (which wasn't deleted by BJ as it wasn't a duplicate) on an entry from 2005 which says that it is still accepting comments and trackbacks, sigh. Maybe I was incorrect in my above assumption that all old entries have been closed.

My activity log says that BJ is doing lots of duplicate checking, and deleting a fair amount of my trackback spam, but I have not seen it close comments or trackbacks since it was first installed. Even disabling and re-enabling the comment & TB closure feature didn't cause it to go out and close the old stuff like that entry above.

What else can I do to help you figure out this cron-generated warning? The cron reports are still coming regularly, all with the same warning about the string eq.

Hi Kelly,

I should have been more specific in my first question: how many trackbacks do you have total, including junk trackbacks?

I just sent a test trackback to the entry you linked -- did it go through?

I have another question: prior to using Blog Janitor, did you manually turn off comments on any entries? If so, is there any chance that you might have turned off comments but left trackbacks enabled for some/all of those cases? If so, you may have run into a rare exception in the way Blog Janitor works. When Blog Janitor looks for entries to close, he only looks at entries that have comments enabled. As such, if there are any entries that already have closed comments but enabled trackbacks (a rare case, but possible), then trackbacks on those entries wouldn't get closed.

Hi Mark,

At the moment I have 5 valid, 1 unpublished (yours from earlier today), and 47 junk trackbacks. I cleared the junk out a couple of weeks ago before installing Blog Janitor.

I think my older-entry-open-trackback problem does partially come from having comments already closed but Trackbacks left open. I've tried in the past to use the MT-close "plugin" to close comments and trackbacks en masse manually. However my MT says that the entry in question (link in my last response) has both comments and trackbacks open even though I don't see a comment box on the entry's page. Puzzling.

The warning in my cron logs is (hopefully!) a separate issue; can we do anything about that?

Many thanks for your time!

I'm on a windows server so I can't do cron jobs - is there a way that I could start it manually every once in a while?

Andy, you don't need cron jobs to use this plugin.

Blog Janitor gets triggers with Movable Type's "scheduled tasks". A cron job is one way to trigger scheduled tasks, but there are two others:

1) When your MT received a JUNK comment or trackback, it will trigger scheduled task automatically.

2) When an "Activity Feed" is requested,it will trigger scheduled task automatically.

The second option can be used to manually activate Blog Janitor. For example, if you are on the "Comments" screen in MT, click on the "Comments Feed" link near the top right. This will display an "activity feed", and behind the scenes, Blog Janitor will get to work. However if you get JUNK comments regularly, you won't even need to trigger things manually.

Very useful program. But for some reason blog janitor stopped closing comments after ~12 hrs, and I noticed only those entries which were created this year have comments closed. All entries as old as 4 years prior still have comments enabled.

I upgraded to movabletype 3.34(i think) at the start of this year. Is it possible blog janitor simply doesn't target entries created in older movable type versions?