Webdev: January 2004 Archives

When entering a comment in a Movable Type powered site, a radio button is available telling you that it is going to 'Remember personal info'. However, sometimes when you come back to the same site and want to write another comment, all fields are empty. Your personal info has not been saved... :-(

The problem I described above appears regularly on the Movable Type support forum, and since the answer is always the same, I created this explanation, so I only have to point here to answer the question.

Today version 2.66 of Movable Type has been released, which addresses amongs others some of the comment spam issues.

I installed the update, and wrote a test comment to see how it works, but the entry did not show up anymore. Mozilla told me that there was a XML parsing error, and since I am serving my pages as application/xhtml+xml, Moz did not parse the page at all. I quickly changed my server settings so that my pages are served as text/html, and looked into the code.

The problem is that MT is now using a proxy script to link to the sites mentioned in comments, so spammers do not receive any 'Google Karma' by posting comments. The problem lies in the use of & in the URL, while they should have used &. For example, a link to this site appears as:

http://jeroensangers.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cmts.cgi?__mode=red&u=http%3A%2F%2Fjeroensangers.com%2F"

while they should have used:

http://jeroensangers.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cmts.cgi?__mode=red&u=http%3A%2F%2Fjeroensangers.com%2F"

I did a quick search in the new files, and found the error in the file lib/MT/Template/Context.pm at line 1189. Just add 4 characters, and MT produces valif HTML again.

[Update 2004.01.16]: Six Apart published MT version 2.661 to fix this problem.