MTOS 4.1 – Spam Comment Bug

Published on 18 February 2008 in , ,

This will hopefully be the last post on the whole comment spam thing – for now anyway. Today I actually (and accidentally) tracked down the reason why spam comments were going live on this site.

There appears to be a bug in Movable Type Open Source v4.1 – at least on Firefox anyway. If you go to Manage Comments, and select “Spam Comments”, you get given a list of spam comments. Now generally with spam, you want to get rid of it. If you hit “Empty” straight away, without selecting any spam items in particular, then everything is deleted.

However if you select the checkbox next to a comment, then hit Empty, the selected comments don’t get deleted. Instead they get approved and published.

I’ve reported the bug via the Movable Type website – unfortunately the bug list doesn’t appear to be publicly trackable (which is a shame), but it’s case 68421 for anyone on the inside who does have access.