Phil Gyford

Mainly so that anyone Googling for solutions to these problems is satisfied, those handy folk on the Movable Type support forum have solved the problems I was having.

The first problem was getting Scheduled Posting to work. Whenever run-periodic-tasks was run by cron I ended up with “Can't locate MT.pm in @INC...” errors. It seems that although Six Apart updated the Guide to MT 3.1 with the correct instructions, they hadn’t updated the actual manual (which is what I was reading, quite understandably I thought). Brad Choate describes the solution:

Make sure that the Movable Type directory is the current working directory when you execute the script. The cron job task should be like this:

cd /path/to/mt_dir; ./tools/run-periodic-tasks

And that does the trick.

The second problem was that when I sent a load of TrackBacks from one weblog to another only the first few worked. The rest generated “403 Throttled” errors in the Activity Log. I tried messing with ThrottleSeconds in mt.cfg to no avail. It turns out there are a couple of undocumented configuration settings, as Phil Ringnalda describes:

There are two undocumented mt.cfg directives now, OneHourMaxPings and OneDayMaxPings — if you don’t set those yourself, they should be defaulting to 10 and 50. Did you send five pings before those last five when it crapped out, within the same hour? That would run you afoul of OneHourMaxPings.

ThrottleSeconds is rather odd at affecting the Trackback throttle: it does nothing to the one hour throttle, but for no particular reason the one day throttle is actually ThrottleSeconds*4000-1, so that if you set ThrottleSeconds to 0, you allow yourself OneDayMaxPings every second (though usually you would expect OneHour to trigger before that).

Upping OneHourMaxPings does the job, and MT 3 seems more capable of sending a large number of pings from an entry than previous versions ever were.