Should I stay or should I go?

Two words: WORK. BUSY.
Oh, hell, one more can’t hurt: FUCK!
But this is not a Work post. This is about whether I will be overhauling this site during winter vacation or not.
You see, I’m thinking about ditching Movable Type for another blogging platform. It is a great shame that MT’s great success is quickly becoming its downfall due to comment spam, but it is a fact. Spammers target MT blogs in particular because of the broad user base – spamming is all about volume, I guess. Spam pisses me off, and I tend to take attacks on my weblog rather seriously.
So. I have thought of upgrading to Movable Type 3 and MT Blacklist 2, but I’ve heard more than a few words of caution and it doesn’t seem that this upgrade improves the spam situation very much at all. As far as MT3’s TypeKey system goes, I’d rather not have comments at all than make my readers jump though registration/authorization hoops like that. Geek that I am, I wanted to upgrade since MT3 first came out, but I followed an old rule of thumb and waited for the action reports to start streaming in from the early adopters. If I stay with MT, I will of course upgrade at some point, but I need to decide whether to “stay or go” first.
I am thinking about other blogging platforms, but am far from deciding. Other people who have switched from MT know the best, and I am reading about their experiences across a wide range of blogging software/services (Some people, in desperation, have even ditched dedicated MT installations for Blogger/Blogspot accounts. I am not that desperate. Yet.). To be honest, if it were not for the gnarlific spam problems that are only getting more and more heinoucerous, I would not be thinking about other platforms at all, because at this point, I don’t see any as well-developed and rich in features as Movable Type.
So maybe I will upgrade after all.
As a stopgap, before upgrading to MT3 I could use a Captcha system, which is a short code set against a disruptive background that the commenter has to read and type in (thus defeating automated spam bots). I may lose some of my blind readers with this system, but that is a risk I may be forced to take…
This entire diarrheastic stream of ranty incomprehension has led me to conclude: Spammers should be rounded up and shot, or at least poked with red hot swords in the eyeballs until they repent.

3 thoughts on “Should I stay or should I go?

  1. Justin, I upgraded to MT 3.1 and MT-B as well. Spam is still a problem, and I need to make other changes to make it a little more difficult. Captcha may be ok, but I have another solution. E-mail for more details.

  2. abandon MT?
    nah. There’s no spam killing magic on the other platforms either. You’d be better served with an upgrade to 3x and to kick around some of the ideas on the MT developers list now. They’ve got some big brains working on it now.

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