Peenie Wallie

I created a folder and extracted all of the files into it.

Following the Spamlookup directions:

There are several files to install for SpamLookup. The following is a list of each and the directory location where they belong. You may need to create directories if they do not already exist ("mt/" is a reference to your MT home directory):

* Directory: mt/plugins/spamlookup/
o spamlookup.pl
o mt-spamlookup.cgi
o sltool

* Directory: mt/plugins/spamlookup/tmpl/
o comments.tmpl
o config.tmpl
o despam.tmpl
o logs.tmpl
o pings.tmpl
o slfooter.tmpl
o slheader.tmpl
o view_cache.tmpl

* Directory: mt/images/spamlookup/
o nav-viewlog.gif

Of these files, mt-spamlookup.cgi and sltool should have "execute" permission (permission mode of 755). The other files must simply be readable (permission mode of 644).

So, I put the files in the appropriate folders, as listed above. Basically, you can just copy the two folders (images/spamlookup and plugins/spamlookup) under the corresponding MT directories.

Upon installing the plugin, login to Movable Type. You should see a new "SpamLookup" plugin listed on the Main Menu of Movable Type. Click the "SpamLookup" link to start using the plugin. You should review the configuration settings after installing the plugin (if you're an administrator, you will see an option to configure the plugin).

Right. No such luck. I got "Can't load error template; got error 'Loading template 'error.tmpl' failed:" followed by about six lines of error messages.

I found my error message described here. It indicated that I should change my mt.cfg file so that the tmpl path was fully qualified. So, I changed it from ./tmpl to /www.peeniewallie.com/mt/tmpl:

# TemplatePath ./tmpl
TemplatePath /www.peeniewallie.com/mt/tmpl

But this didn't work, as it actually broke my Movable Type installation. So, I tinkered some more. Finally decided that what the syntax indicated that it was not a url, but was, in fact, a fully qualified Unix path. So, since I'm running windows, I should put in a fully qualified Windows path. So, I changed the mt.cfg as follows:

# TemplatePath ./tmpl
TemplatePath c:\inetpub\wwwroot\mt\tmpl

This fixed my problem. Now, Movable Type works. MT-Blacklist works. And Spamlookup appears to be working. (At least I can launch it now.) What's interesting, is that I now realize that in my MT.CFG file, I used forward slashes(/)(as in Unix) instead of back slashes(\)(as in Windows). But, as far as I know, this is the first time it's caused me a problem.

So, in any event, it appears to be working. It has default setting which I'm going to leave for now. I assume it is working correctly, and I'll just watch my logs to see if it actually traps any trackback spams.

Many thanks to Brad Choate of Six Apart for writing this fine plugin, and to Jay Allen, author of MT-Blacklist, also of Six Apart, for recommending it. I'm now running MT-Blacklist and Spamlookup, and flogging the tar out of those reprehensible trackback spammers!

Here's my directions for Installing MT-Blacklist 2.04 beta under Windows XP with Movable Type 3.17.

My Environment:
O/S: Windos XP Professional SP2
Web Server: Internet Information Services(IIS) 5.1
Database: MySQL 2.9004
Scripts: ActivePerl 5.8.6.811
Blog: Movable Type 3.17
Plugins: Spamlookup 2.0 beta 2
MT-Blacklist 2.04 beta
NoFollow 3.17

Update: After checking the activity log, I found some MT-Blacklist error messages in the log that I believe were related to the installation of SpamLookup.