Category: The Blog

Comment Spam Woes

Even with MT-Blacklist, the amount of time I have had to spend dealing with comment spam has been annoying lately, and apparently I am not the only one who’s having issues.

I am trying to decide how to manage the problem. SixApart says they are working on a solution but apparently it will involve upgrading my installation of MT and of MT-Blacklist. That’s a fair chunk of work on my part because moving off 2.x will entail not only the upgrade but a bunch of hours tweaking templates to put my customizations back in, and I am a little pressed for time these days.

I may try to implement the system Pandagon uses for its comments section, which is a patch that generates a random 6 digit number and requires users to type it in before a comment will be posted.

I can, of course, just turn off commenting entirely, but I really don’t want to do that.

Comment Spam

Comment spam, which to date has been pretty minimal, has sharply spiked upwards the past few days. I suppose it’s the price of increased site traffic, but it’s annoying. Not that I get a lot of comments, but I definitely prefer to keep commenting on when possible. I have reluctantly decided to turn off comments on some of the more popular older posts (e.g. the ones on The Davinci Code and Fahrenheit 9/11) on my site for now, since they’re the posts getting hardest hit with comment spam.

I’m planning on upgrading to Movable Type 3.1 when it comes out, in large part becasue it will integrate the MT-Blacklist plugin. If comment spam starts getting really bad I may implement the plugin sooner than that, but I’m going to try to hold out for just the one upgrade so I don’t have to implement the same change twice.

The Grey Lady and Blogs

As Yogi Berra might say, “It’s deja vu all over again.” Remember the spate of articles published in the mid-late 1990s about people who used the then-new medium called the Internet? What did many of them focus on? Obsessive Internet use. So today, The New York Times writes about blogs. And what do they focus on? Obsessive bloggers.

Blogging is a pastime for many, even a livelihood for a few. For some, it becomes an obsession.

Can’t the mainstream media come up with something else to write about? There are probably a couple of million blogs out here in the blogosphere. There’s got to be something more newsworthy in all that wealth of punditry, rants, raves, personal details, pet and child photos, and general snarkiness. There’s got to be at least a few good stories in there somewhere.

The cynic in me suggests that if mainstream media were to take a more realistic look at blogs and blogging, they would have to ask themselves some hard questions about whether they don’t have some things to learn about reporting from the blogosphere. (Jeff Jarvis has touched on this subject over at Buzz Machine). So instead, they look at the freakshow aspects.

I certainly don’t consider myself to be obsessed with my blog. There are days I post multiple times, there are days I don’t post at all. If I don’t post for a couple of days, I do start feeling like I ought to get something up here, but it’s hardly a compulsion. And I suspect many – dare I say most? – casual bloggers feel the same way.

But of course, that’s not newsworthy.

Response to Mena

OK, I’ll add my two cents to the list of “How I use MT” trackbacks. I currently have one author and two blogs. I expect to add one more blog every 6 to 12 months within my own personal blog. Plans are in the works to add two more blogs and two more authors for friends/family members.

But I also want to make it very clear that my personal concern is not ultimately about the number of authors and weblogs allocated to each segment of the license. That’s a symptom of the bigger problem. Simply put, it’s about perceived value for price. The issue is not “I don’t want to pay for MT”. The issue is, I don’t want to pay this particular price for this particular feature set.

I would be quite willing to shell out $ for MT above and beyond what I already paid last fall *if* there were a current and/or future feature set worth paying for. Optimizing existing code is fine but that plus one questionable new feature (spammers have already begun to register over on typekey) is not enough change. Right now there is no compelling reason for the user like me to upgrade except for the fact that if we don’t do it now, it may well cost more to upgrade in the future. Maybe you can get away with that if you’re Microsoft, but not if you’re a startup like SixApart.

Here’s a few examples: Give me a CMS that does not require me to rebuild my site because I add one link to my links list. Give me more and better tools for managing comments that does not force me into a 3rd party service. Give me more and better tools for creating and mangaing templates. Make it easier to integrate graphics into posts, or even a whole photo album.

Give me stuff like that and I’ll get out my credit card again.

Since Mena said she was going to delete trackbacks that are “commentaries on SixApart” this one probably won’t stay in the trackback list for long. But I hope that it at least gets read and the message gets through.