Configuring MT-Approval: Dates
If you are feeling a little adventurous, and don't mind using a bit of JavaScript, then you can implement the Load Date and Save Date. These are also beacons of sorts, but since they actually are set when certain activities happen, and not when the pages are built, they require JavaScript. This means that users without JavaScript - or automated posters without JavaScript - will be out of luck.
As with the standard Beacon, you can set the name for these beacons. You may also choose to set the name for the Comment Spam JavaScript template below, as the contents are used to set the values of these fields, and even if you populate your own JavaScript, you will need to make sure that your functions are accessible or you may not be able to accept any comments at all!
After you have the Load Date and Save Date, you can really have some fun. Because your average person - that is, a real live person - is going to take at least a few seconds to fill in a comment form, make sure that they do so. Since we know when they loaded the page, and we know when they submitted the page, we can check to see how long it took them to fill it out.
Most automated postings won't take any time at all - that's why they do what they do, after all: Because they can and because it doesn't take any time to do it. If they have to slow down, it gets more expensive to them.
Here you can tell the plugin just how long you think that it should take for a real, live human being to post a comment. The value is in seconds, and while it may seem like 15 seconds is a short time for a default, keep two things in mind.
First, it's your site, so you can set it to whatever you want. Second, this number applies to the preview as well - so it's not just for the regular comment form!
A normal person will load the page, read the content, compose their thoughts and then type - so unless they are a super-fast reader, even a number that takes up a few minutes probably won't be a problem for a regular person. But it will stop an automatic posting tool in its tracks.
Each of these items (Load Date, Save Date and Timestamp) has the option to determine what you want to do if the values are missing or invalid.
To skip taht test, you can set the value to Off.
If you want to send the comment to moderation rather than being published, you should choose Moderate.
By choosing Discard, comments will simply be thrown away, so use caution with this option.
Finally, you can Junk any comments, and this also gives you the ability to control the weight of the junk score.
Return to configuring the MT-Approval plugin.