Comment Spammers Dirty? Blog Software Vendors Dirty, Also?
Well a while ago Danny Sullivan made a post about comment spammers being the dirty sleezy scumbags that they are.
When comment spam was new and limited most of the people who were doing it were somewhat intelligent and did not hit too many live blogs. Since then people have got dumb about how they do it, hitting even blogs ran by search engineers.
I guess I understand working your way around the system or doing what you have to do to compete (I manually added a few spam links to some sites when I was first learning the web & SEO and did not understand some of the broader implications of what I was doing) but eventually as you learn and as techniques lose their value the solution is to move on to doing other things.
Some people are still holding on to comment spam and it is annoying. Some of them are going so far as to register domains like drive.to or shop.at to where if you block the domains it prevents people from writing some common phrases.
And then you got Google caching random .xml documents you do not remember ever creating chuck full of spam. Of course the fine people at MovableType do not care about comment spam when you buy a license, upgrade the software, or pay for an install. No, that is your problem for chosing to use MovableType in the first place.
I would love to see MovableType write an open letter of apoligize to anyone who ever paid for a license to use their swiss holed software in which using requires a ton of operator intervention.
If you are selling thousands of licenses of your software and it has holes in it then you ought to take the time to discuss the issue with people to do a legitimate job to fix the problems. And you ought to apoligize to anyone who paid for the nightmare you put them though with MT. I mean some of this stuff has still been uncovered fairly recently, and your company long ago had VC funding.
How long does it take to plug the holes & make a useful software product?
Comments
I see that MT is being constantly upgraded to meet the changing requirements of users. And you can even upgrade for free. The version 3.1x seems to be thoroughly thought over. For example Dynamic Publishing feature was added. Switching to dynamic publishing doesn't avoid comment spam, but it can significantly reduce the amount of work your server needs to handle for each incoming spam
Actually, I don't like to use MT. It doesn't suit my requirements.
Personally, I thought simply upping stakes and moving to an alternative was all the 'revenge' I needed.
I would never use MT willingly again - I have good things to say about the (for want of a better term) scripting language, but the overheads of operation are just too high.
I expect that will just silently and softly disappear away presently, but I am probably wrong :(
Ah, Movable Type!
It was great when I first tried it - compared to everything else.
Then I started digging deeper and realised how fiendishly complicated it all was.
Then I was baffled as to how so many bloggers had invested time and energy into learning and using it.
Then Movable Type changed their licencing and everyone moved.
And at the same time I got fed up of learning proprietary tags from a book I had to buy to get it to work.
And I realised that there was stuff out there that was a thousand times easier to use and did a thousand more things - and I was HOOKED!
Yes Aaron, you migh consider moving to Wordpress because it leaves Movable Type in the dust.
The best thing I ever did.
So long MT and thanks for starting me off, but you didn't change fast enough.
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