inbetween

There seems to be a bug in the Movabletype 2.661/MT-Blacklist 1.6.5 combination, whereby people posting comments are wrongly throttled.

There are lots of blogs on negativespace.net. The timezones for most of the blogs is set to UTC-8 (Pacific Time), but I forgot to do it on two of them. They were left in UTC+0 (Universal Time, or Grenwich Mean Time (with which I've probably committed another spelling atrocity)). As a result, blog entries and comments posted to the UTC+0 blogs would appear eight hours ahead of the actual local time.

MT-Blacklist checks that comments don't come from any particular IP address too often, but it doesn't take the timezone differences into account. If a reader posted a comment to a UTC+0 blog at noon, it would be "posted" at 8:00 PM Pacific Time. If that same reader wanted to post a comment on one of the UTC-8 blogs, MT-Blacklist throttles the comment, thinking that the comment on first blog just happened.

I think that the real problem is how comments are assumed to be coming from the same timezone as the blog author. I've got comments from around the world on negativespace.net, not all of them from the Pacific Timezone.