In case some of you have wondered, I upgraded the blog software, MovableType, last night. I came under an intense comment spamming attack last night and so I had to make some changes. In case you’re wondering what comment spamming is (lucky you if you don’t know), it’s when spammers try to boost their Google rank by getting links to thier site on all sorts of other sites. Google ranks websites more “relevent” if many other sites link to them so these spammers post messages in the comments like “Nice site!” and when you look at their URL in their profile it’s to some penis enlargement website or an online pharmacy site.
I have MovableType set up to email me when people comment on the site so last night I was a little surprised to see 10 comments come in all at one time. I started to delete them and then another batch of 15 or so came and then another 10. I immediately threw up a .htpasswd file which forces people to login to view the site and that stopped things long enough for me to delete all the spammed messages.
I had heard that the new version of MovableType had better comment administration so I installed it but all it really did was give me the option of making people register with MovableType before they could post. Not exactly something I wanted to do. I did some more searching and found a hack that forces people to input a code before the post will be accepted which I think may be the best solution as most of these spammers are simply using bots to do thier work. The code is a graphic file so unless the bot is pretty sophisticated it won’t be able to read the code to input into the form. Hopefully this will put a temporary end to the comment spamming.
I really wish I could find the time to just write my own blog software. I like MovableType but I hate their licensing. I don’t use it for commercial purposes or run more than X number of blogs so I’m not in threat of violating the free use license but I feel like it’s limiting my options. I would like to use a blog on my consulting website but that would be commercial and so I would have to pay. I also might like to use this on several other of my websites and I might go over the MovableType limits. It just feels like I being pinned in by these guys.
The choice many seem to be making is to go to WordPress. I haven’t checked them out lately (I have a recent install on a dev server that I plan on reviewing) but I really have no confidence in this project based on my previous experience with them. They’re an offshoot of b2 which was a well written piece of software. b2 stopped development and WordPress became the official new fork of the product. I’ve been under the hood of both b2 and WordPress and about a year ago when I looked at WordPress it was a total mess. No offense intended but just looking at the code you could tell this team had never built large systems software before. In fact, they took some of the things b2 got right and mucked it up. They started combining the business logic and presentation layers and shoehorning in features. When I posted on thier support forum that this seemed to be 180 degrees in the opposite direction of good coding/architecture practices I was told that if I could do it better that I should build my own. It almost seems ironic that they tout their HTML/CSS compliance as one of thier biggest achievements and selling points but then violate so many software design best practices.
Well, until I get a wild hair up my butt and lock myself in a room for 72 hours to write my own weblog software I’ll either live with the limitations of MovableType or find some way to overlook the deficiencies in WordPress.