So. Yesterday, I log in to my happy Movable Type console, and I have 70 entries, and about 74 comments. About 70 of these are legit, as I still hadn't weeded out a couple of the Phentermine ones mentioned a little while ago. I'm about a one-comment per entry guy, one woman man, one man army, one two buckle my shoe. Anyway.

Today, I log in, and I have 70 entries, and 1220 comments.

So, you know, if you tuned in and thought I had a bunch of questionably literate readers who really enjoy promoting beastiality sites, well, sorry to disappoint. I got blogspammed pretty hard, which is odd, because I have yet to actually take the time to add myself to the blog lists that I mentioned before.

Needless to say, deleting almost 1200 comments individually sucked pretty hard. I went to get the latest version of MT, which I've been meaning to do for some time, and found that I'd slept through what has become a rather big fiasco. While I don't agree with the angry mobs claiming they've sold out and ruined everything, I will admit that they really botched this very delicate maneuver pretty badly. This is like New Coke level botchery (corn-syrup marketing genius conspiracy theory aside.) Only, in Six Apart's case, they don't really have Old Coke to fall back on. And Pepsi's giving it away, with the pretty strong argument that they legally have to under the GNU license.

After some digging, I managed to find the last normal version that is still free, 2.661. I did the upgrade from 2.21 and it went mostly smoothly. That's what I'm typing into at the moment, which is good. Sadly, it doesn't have anywhere near the comment-spam fighting capabilities that I was hoping for. I've banned the offending IPs from today, and hopefully the scant new measures will make it so I dont have to tick 1200 bloody check boxes again. That's an insane number, especially given how unpopular and insignificant this blog is. Even if I do get that many, I've at least become aware of easier ways to cleanse them. (I dislike blacklist systems, but this appears to have the kind of comment-deletion interface MT mysteriously lacks.) However, if it starts to really become a problem, I may implement a CAPTCHA-based verificationeratermatron (by this guy) to the comments section, because, frankly, it looks cool, the people who really want to comment probably won't mind entering the code, and it keeps me from getting 1200 bits of spam while still allowing people to post within an hour of their last comment. You know, "Oh, and also, I forgot to mention..." kind of posts. That is the weakness of MT's new spam stuff- all it really lets you do is auto-ban an IP for posting within x time period of their last post. Which, sure, keeps people from posting 10 times a second, but to be meaningful also means people only get to post once within a 30 min period or so. Not a great solution. If I could say "post more than 10 times in a 24 period = ban" then I'd be in good shape. I could delete 10 malignant posts easily.

Anyway, I'm not going apeshit about it, which seems like what I would do. But if I have another 1200, man, that means war.

I have, however, decided to test out the Pepsi mentioned earlier. I'd looked at Wordpress before, but it was kind of crappy at the time. I'm still not turning my back on MT, but I figure it's best to familiarize myself with it before I have to. Plus, it's been a while since I tried to wreck my linux box with some new MySQL-based mouth to feed.

It took me about 3 minutes to install, and another 45 seconds to seamlessly import all my MT entries. Well, they're making it hard not to like them, I'll say that. I haven't changed the design template at all, but behold, the test version of the Wordpress Z Axis.

FARNSWORTH: Good news, everyone, it's got easily-readable CSS that Patrick has yet to turn into a usability nightmare!

Actually, needless Futurama references aside, I very well may pillage some of the CSS from their design. The text does look quite gorgeous. Plus, it incorporates some of what I've done here manually (the "Stuff I like" box) into the actual administration interface.

Very nice so far. We'll see how it goes.

At the very least, I will probably move the TAB blog to wordpress, simply because right now I am having to abuse MT far too much to get the result I'm trying for. It wasn't designed for what I'm doing, and Wordpress seems much more up that particular alley.

Anyway. 1200 bits of rape and beastiality porn spam. I'd say this is the big time, but nobody was interested in reducing my mortgage rates.

[just wait'll your father gets home]