One of the benefits of being a member of the Six Apart ProNet is the ProNet mailing list. MT-Moderate 1.0.0's announcement showed up in my mailbox yesterday. Neil has already wrote some on it, but I have some more to add. MT-Moderate plugs one of the biggest holes that Movable Type 3 - there is no way to moderate trackbacks.

MT-Moderate is a plugin for Movable Type 3 that can force moderation on both comments and trackbacks. It has two variables to configure and you are done. I use MT-Blacklist to manage my comment moderation - and it does a very good job at that - so I do not need MT-Moderate for comments. Luckily the developer has made his plugin in a modular manner. You can delete the comments.pm file from the server, and viola, it only manages trackbacks.

I set the configuration variables to '-1' so every trackback is moderated, no matter how old it is. This is because I get trackback spam much more often then I get legit trackbacks. What is worse is that I get trackback spam in waves. I am happy to say that all of today's trackbacks were force moderated by MT-Moderate. This is a must have plugin for anyone who is running Movable Type 3.

With all the wonderful features in Movable Type, you would think that trackback moderation would be one of them. As it should be handled just like comment moderation, I hope to see it as an added feature in a future release. MT-Blacklist can't even force moderation on trackbacks. MT-Moderate does, and does well.