David Raynes has come up with yet another great plugin for MovableType. The MT-Close plugin allows you to go through your entire blog and close the entries older than “x” day. So, if you don’t want people to comment on last month’s posts (for example), you would set MT-Close to “30” days and let it go through and close all your posts automatically.
I don’t know if this is the 100% solution for me, per se, but it certainly would help to prevent comment spam on older posts. Like Shaan, I would like to see this project further expanded to allow category-specific options.
If you’re going to close the comments, then you definitely need to do rebuild the individual archives and modify your templates to remove the comment form on closed entries. Otherwise you will end up with people trying to submit comments on closed entries and getting an error message.
I started using this script (or a similar one, I don’t recall) and found the MT very simple to use. For example, an older entry (link) now shows a “Comments are no longer…” message.
You put your comments form inside the <MTEntryIfCommentsOpen> tags (as you would normally) and your notification text inside <MTElse> tags (also inside the <MTEntryIfCommentsOpen> tags). Both of those sets of tags are wrapped inside the <MTIfAllowComments> tags. If that’s confusing, let me post an actual example:
<MTIfAllowComments>
you would insert your formatting and comments
<MTEntryIfCommentsOpen>
insert your form code here
<MTElse>
insert your comments closed notice here
</MTElse>
</MTEntryIfCommentsOpen>
<MTIfAllowComments>
And, as previously mentioned, just try to remember to rebuild the individual archives (at least until you mod the script to do that!)