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January 19, 2004

You can’t fight a war against lunchmeat without breaking eggs. Various anti-comment-spam measures have been taken, some of which will be evident to longtime readers. One such measure entails closing all comment threads over 60 days old, and I hope to to soon work out how to automate this on a constant basis.

What I’ve noticed, though, is that the comment-entry form stays present even on a page for an Electrolite entry that’s had commenting set to “closed.” This seems unfair to the casual reader who might well invest some time in typing up a comment, only to find at the end of the process that it won’t post. Any suggestions from Movable Type adepts about how to make the form go away, while keeping the old comments visible, would be much appreciated.

UPDATE: Ginger Stampley emailed the missing piece. I had managed to lose track of whatever neurons remembered how <MTEntryIfAllowComments> and <MTEntryIfCommentsOpen> work together. [09:40 PM]

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Hard-Hitting Moderator: Teresa Nielsen Hayden.

Comments on You can't fight a war against lunchmeat without breaking eggs.:

Ginger ::: (view all by) ::: January 19, 2004, 11:49 PM:

There's a tag (MTEntryIfCommentsOpen) in the MT documentation that you put around the comment form to handle this. Check the default comment listing template on the MT site to see the tag in action.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden ::: (view all by) ::: January 20, 2004, 07:53 AM:

I have that tag in place, and it's evidently not working, ever after a full site rebuild. It doesn't work on threads I've closed from the MT interface and it doesn't work on the hundreds of threads I closed with a MySQL query. It only seems to work on threads that never had comments enabled in the first place (the top option in the MT entry-form pop-down, "none").

Chuq von Rospach's observations in the post that trackbacked this one are interesting, too, but not directly pertinent to this particular problem as far as I can figure out.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden ::: (view all by) ::: January 20, 2004, 10:58 AM:

Problem solved; post updated to extend due credit to Ginger Stampley, who sorted out the problem in email. D'oh.