a question for you

Here’s the thing. I’m getting a lot of comment spam lately. It’s depressing, because for a good four or five months, I had none at all. Those slee sneeky spammers have obviously found a way around the safeguards currently in place.

/aside/ This is the kind of thing I obsess about when I’m procrasting about writing. I tell you this is the spirit of full disclosure. /aside/

So I have been thinking about solutions.

The most drastic choice would be to dump Movable Type for software that has got the spam thing more under control. It would be tremendously time consuming to export everything here, learn the new software, set that up, and import things. Not to mention the long list of glitches that would almost certainly ensue.

The easiest thing would be to find a plugin for MT 3.2 that puts one of those funny little boxes on the comment page that you have to interpret so your comment will be posted. Except, no such plugin exists (or at least, I haven’t been able to find one that I can have even a hope of installing).

So an experiment. I set up a month long trial at Type Pad (which is really Movable Type for dummies — everything set up already, pretty easy to make changes to design and import everything from here). I imported everything. You want to see it? Here.

Good things: all the infelicities that have snuck into the guts of this weblog over three years are gone. Everything clean and tidy. They have one of those boxes on the comment page, which should take care of 95% of comment spam. I never have to worry about software upgrades again.

Bad things: Lots of my bells and whistles would have to go. Maybe some of them are retrievable if I want to invest the time in figuring out how to make “posted last year on this date” work over at Type Pad. Which right now, I don’t. The categories list is not nested, which bugs me. There’s no search function. It’s quite pricey. And worst of all, I’ll have to fiddle with domain mapping or change the url of the weblog, which always brings along a huge number of problems. Now, on that last point, I am probably going to have to change the url anyway, so that’s nosobad.

I’m sure I lost most of you three paragraphs ago, but if you’re still here and you have an opinion, would you share it?

Yours in procrastination
the management