December 13, 2003

Oh LazyWeb, I invoke thee

Posted by Kieran

Question: Is there a way to automatically close comments threads in Movable Type after a fixed period of time? I know this can be done when your MT installation runs an SQL backend, but ours doesn’t. I suppose we should have used SQL from the get-go, but what can I say?

Posted on December 13, 2003 11:52 PM UTC
Comments

It would be a fairly simple matter to convert to an SQL backend and then use the script you reference.

Posted by Norman Jenson · December 14, 2003 03:23 AM

After looking at the MT source, I think that it would be a reasonably easy thing to write a script using the standard MT plug-in interface that would do this for old comment threads regardless of what data storage method you use, but it would be pretty slow in the Berkeley DB file case, because you don’t have an SQL engine to do the grunt work (i.e., the script would need to load the entries that matched your older-than request, change them and write them back to the DB file). That may have something to do with why there isn’t a plug-in for that already floating around. I guess that still might be preferable to paying extra for an SQL database, if your provider charges for it.

Posted by Kevin Wenzel · December 15, 2003 03:56 PM
Followups

This discussion has been closed. Thanks to everyone who contributed.