Blog Janitor is a plugin for Movable Type that preforms various clean-up tasks. Blog Janitor can perform the following tasks:

• Close comments on old entries.
• Delete duplicate comments and trackbacks

Blog Janitor does his work automatically, you don't need to edit your templates. Just tell Blog Janitor the tasks you want him to perform (by adjusting the plugin settings), and he will go to work periodically (using the scheduled tasks feature of MT).

New in Version 1.1

• Support for MT4. Blog Janitor now works with either MT3.3x or MT4+. No new features in this release.

Here are some details on Blog Janitor's current skills:

Close Comments and Trackbacks on Old Entries

One technique for reducing blog spam is to close comments (disable commenting) and trackbacks on entries that are older than a certain number of days. This can be a tedious process to do manually, if you remember to do it. Blog Janitor can take care of this job for you. Simply enable Close Comments in the plugin settings for a blog, and tell Blog Janitor the number of days he should wait before closing comments on an entry. That's all you have to do, Blog Janitor will routinely check for old entries and close comments on them for you.

Delete Duplicate Comments and Trackbacks

Duplicate comments and trackbacks can happen in a number of ways. For example, a commenter may hit the submit button twice, thinking that the comment did not get posted the first time. Another common occurence is duplicate junk comments and trackbacks -- since spammer often post identical spam messages, your Junk folders may be full of duplicates. Blog Janitor is skilled a scanning your recent comments and trackbacks for duplicates. If you give him the order (by enabling duplicate checking in plugin Settings), he look for recent duplicates and delete them. Just tell him how many recent items to scan, and he will go to work every hour looking for recent duplicates. (Note: there is no "undo" when Blog Janitor deletes items, but he does leave a message in the Activity Log notifying you of which items he has deleted).

Settings

The Settings is where you give Blog Janitor his orders. Go to the blog you want, then go to the Plugin settings for Blog Janitor. The settings look like this:

Requirements

• MT 3.3x or MT4+

Instructions

1. Download the zip file and expand it.
2. Upload the contents of the 'plugins' directory in to the 'plugins' directory of you MT installation (usually /cgi-bin/mt/plugins/)
3. Adjust the settings as described above

Notes:

• If you have a large number if entries in your blog, Blog Janitor will not close comments on every old entry the first time he goes to work. He gets tired if he tries to close comments on too many entries at a time, and his union contract states that he doesn't have to close comments on more than 100 entries each hour. (Okay, the real reason is to save your MT from excess load that might slow things down) Since Blog Janitor works on up to 100 entries each hour, it may take some time before he gets 'caught up'. For example, if you have 2400 entries on your blog, it will take about 24 hours for Blog Janitor to go through all the old entries and close comments and trackbacks.
• Blog Janitor punches his time clock when he starts and finishes a task. For each task, he posts a message to the Activity Log that explains what task was completed, and how many seconds it took him to complete. If you are concerned about system load, keep an eye on the Log to see how hard he is working.

Get Blog Janitor

Commercial Use: $97

If you buy a commercial license, you will get priority for future features, and an advanced version of Blog Janitor that enables you to give Blog Janitor orders on a system-wide basis (so you can adjust the settings in once place for all blogs on the system).

Blog Janitor is free for personal use:

Download Now

Membership required, please sign-in or register:

As always, comments and suggestions are welcome - please reply to this entry.