Affordable Host “upgraded” the server on which this site resides, and I’ve noticed that some stuff has broken. (Not to mention, they removed the only webmail program with a decent interface.) I’m probably following Pirate Merry‘s hordes over to Liquid Web soon….
But that requires migrating all these Movable Type files over to a different hosting company. Pain. In. The. Ass.
Anyway, this entry is here in part to bitch about AH and in part to make sure I can still post to this website.
Kick the tires. Lemme know what you think. I’ve already figured out that certain actions (like clicking the Archives link) cause IE (for Windows 2000, at least) to crash. This is bad since, like, 195% of web surfers use IE.
UPDATE: I appear to have fixed the Archive problem. When I ran the code through the HTML validator, I realized that I forgot to close off an H1. I had <h1>dietsch<h1>, where I should have had <h1>dietsch</h1>. And, that simple error, friends, caused IE to crash. Why do so many people still use that browser? I guess the same reason so many people think the sun revolves around the earth.
Bloggers Ben Hammersley and Reid Stott discuss another side to the comment-spam problem: that of the web providers that host blogs.
It seems many web-hosting companies are facing such a server load, as spammers bomb weblogs with comment spam, that they are opting to stop supporting and hosting MT sites altogether.
Reid Stott makes another observation that echoes many of my complaints, but let me back up for a minute before I address Stott’s observation.
One potential solution to the comment-spam problem is to set up TypeKey authentication for commenting. This basically forces a potential commenter to register on your site before they can comment there.
Stott points out how hard it is to find Six Apart’s TypeKey documentation. You’ve heard me blag on about how frustrating it is to install or fix MT problems when the documentation is so hard to find and understand, and I’m happy to see someone echo this frustration.
It is encouraging to hear from Anil Dash that 6A is working on the problem, but I suspect that whatever fix 6A implements will just get “broken” again by spammers as the war escalates.
Sigh. I can’t decide who’s worse–the jackass spammers or the dumbasses who buy from them, thus encouraging them to spam all the more.
I’ve taken a couple of steps that I hope will cut down on comment spam. Only one is actually noticeable–when you click the Comments link, you’ll no longer see a popup window for the comment. Let’s hope these steps help.
Ben Hammersley discusses a new form of comment spam, in which a commenter leaves a generic comment like “Nice site!” or “I agree!” The URL in the comments points to the person’s personal website (something like www.stephjones.com), but the URL doesn’t resolve to an actual domain, so when you follow the link, the page comes up blank.
Since the commenter isn’t saying anything of substance, and since the URLs don’t work, I’ve assumed these were spam and deleted all of them accordingly. I’m glad to see a reasonable explanation for why this is happening.
So I finally decided to upgrade to MT3, but first I wanted to switch the database over from Berkeley to MySQL. I went to Elise’s Learning MT site, I googled up other instructions, and I followed the instructions on the MT site.
However, switching databases seems to have somehow switched off MT-Blacklist, which is a side effect that none of the instructions mentioned. Had I known it would fuck with my plugins, I might not have bothered. So to my delight, then, I came in this morning to find hundreds of new spam comments on this blog.
There’s nothing fun about coming in every morning and having to sweep out piles of shit from my Mail inbox (in the new-comment notification) and my blog comments.
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Jay Allen, in discussing why he hasn’t updated the master blacklist since the 9th, explains why Blacklist 2.0 is a better option for fighting spam–to wit, it allows you to moderate the addition of comments to older blog entries, thus freeing you to leave comments open on those entries and still not worry about spammers getting in.
So that’s another option. However, Blacklist 2.0 runs only with Movable Type 3.0 and up, to which I’ve not yet upgraded. I’ve closed off comments now on about half this blog’s entries, and I’ve already noticed a marked difference in how much spam I receive. MT3 does offer other attractive new features, such as entry scheduling (which would allow me to write up an entry now and schedule it to be posted to my blog, say, tomorrow or next week) and subcategories (which I want; I’d love to have an overreaching New York City category and several subcats under it).
So I have a couple good reasons to upgrade, and I can get in on the unsupported free upgrade, which probably works for me for now, since I’ve never used MT support, and I’m the only author on this blog. It’s really just a matter of making the time.
Comment spam is getting to be a big problem around here, although I’m probably still on the low-to-moderate end of the scale in terms of how much spam I get on the site.
I already use MT-Blacklist, which works very well, but spammers stay a couple steps ahead of it, so it can’t catch everything. I need futher protection.
I’m going to slowly roll out a few changes around here, in an effort to keep it down. Most of these changes are borrowed from an entry on Elise Bauer’s excellent Learning Movable Type blog. In no particular order, here are the changes I’m planning (these are adapted from Elise’s entry, so visit the link above to read more):
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I finally tweaked the archive templates for this blog, something I’ve meant to do for months. I still don’t know why, when you click some permalinks, the entry’s text completely whites out, but I’ve noticed that on other MovableType blogs, so it’s not just me. I have a couple other fixes to make to the archive templates, but those will have to wait.
