Update (21st March ‘05): I am no longer supporting or working on this plugin as I’ve moved away from MovableType. This plugin will remain available for download and people are free to modify it and rerelease it as needed.
This is a plugin called MT-Close2 for Movabletype (2.65).
MT-Close2 allows you to close comments and trackbacks on multiple entires and blogs on the same installation of MT in one go. This helps fight off comment spam by closing of old entries.
Additionally it allows you to “open” comments and trackbacks, select entries by age and/or number of comments, select by categories and preview list of entries before changing. It also works on non-mySQL installs of MT (unlike MT-Close).
Originally based on David Rayners short script, MT-Close which was originally based on a script from Jeremy D. Zawodny.
To use MT-Close2, download mt-close2.zip (6k) and then unzip mt-close2.zip and place mt-close2.cgi in your base MT directory (the directory where you have mt.cgi). Set the permissions of the file so that it can be executed (normally ‘chmod 755′). Then, to use it, just bring up http://your.mt.url/mt-directory/mt-close2.cgi in your browser of choice.
Best of luck! 
Notes: A few people have asked me how do you show that comments are closed when someone opens an entry. To do this you’ve got add some code to your templates (Individual Entry Template is probaly the best). This is what I add:
<MTEntryIfCommentsOpen><MTElse>
Due to the proliferation of comment spam, I’ve had to close comments on this entry. If you would like to leave comment, please use one of my recent entries. Thank you and sorry for any inconvience caused.
</MTElse></MTEntryIfCommentsOpen>
This will print out the message “Due to the proliferation of comment spam, I’ve had to close comments on this entry. If you would like to leave comment, please use one of my recent entires. Thank you and sorry for any inconvience caused” to the entry of comments are not open on that entry.
I got the comments script working (yay!) but I’m not sure where exactly I put the error message script. Can you be more specific about where in the templates it should go?
Kindle,
I assume by “error” script you mean the MTElse message etc.
I’d recommend placing the error message in any template that contains code for posting comments.
This is normally “Individual Entry Archive” and “Comment Listing Template”.
Does this help?
Thanks, got me out of a bit of a sticky situation where all my comments were closed.
I do have a small request… I’d like to be able to only close comments on posts which haven’t had a reply for a certain amount of time. I’m not sure if this is possible, but it’d be so very useful for me since I have a few old posts which still get real comments made on them.
hmm… this seems to fail. I got it running, it identifies what it’s supposed to, then conks out when I hit GO. Bummer.
Hi Nick,
I’m afraid I’m no longer supporting this plugin. The last time I checked it was working on MT 2.6 perfectly.
The biggest bug though is that if you have a very large number of posts to modify, it can take quite a while to work. I’d suggest making sure this isn’t the problem.
Hope this helps
thanks for the plugin. works great.