I gave up.  I finally closed the comments on this Java Projects entry that kept receiving comments from Indian students who don’t bother reading what they are commenting on.  I think there are more than two hundred (200!) comments from students asking me for project ideas by now.  I didn’t close the comments initially because I wanted to see how far the insanity could go…  Well, very far it seems, and no end in sight.

Updating the entry to point visitors to a clarification didn’t change anything:  the requests for project ideas kept coming at the pace of about one per day, so I decided to put an end to it.

Except that…  my Movable Type installation is using Berkeley DB, and there is no way to close comments or trackbacks for past entries (or do any kind of batch operation for that matter).  The only way was to move it over to MySQL, which ended up being surprisingly easy.

The first thing to do is to download Movable Type 3, which contains a very handy mt-db2sql.cgi script.  That’s all you need from Movable Type 3 and this script works on Movable Type 2 (the one I’m using).  All you need to do is put this script in your installation directory and follow the instructions.  The script took a few minutes to run (I have over three hundred entries by now, several thousand comments and the script transfers everything, including the logs, which I couldn’t care less for) but it completed successfully and after that, I was migrated.  As simple as that.

My MT-BlackList installation was disabled during the process, but reactivating it was a simple matter of going to the main page and checking a box.

I connected manually to the MySQL database to double check and everything worked like a charm.  The schemas are very intuitive and a few SELECT, UPDATE and WHERE later, I had closed the comments for the offending entry and also the trackbacks for all my past entries (the latest trend used by spammers, which shows at least that CAPTCHA’s are working fine).

Sorry, India, you’ll have to look somewhere else for Java projects.