The reality of running a weblog

I didn’t pay attention to Notio for a month, and accumulated nearly 900 comment spams. I deleted with extreme prejeduce. This morning I found a new legitimate comment on an older post. If I perhaps accidentially deleted a comment you made, my apologies. Comments are one of the great aspects of weblogs; I’m hesitant to turn them off. Spam sucks; I don’t have time to look at each of 900 comments individually. If I check Notio each day then I can delete them more easily.
Moveable Type still doesn’t have good tools to deal with all this. Yes, MT-Blacklist is okay. But why can’t I say, “Entries older than X days; close the comments.” The only choice is to send them to moderation, where I have to manually click a checkbox for each deletion.
And, I notice that I’ve also got trackback spam. Great. So, show me the entries where trackback is on, and trackback pings are present. No can do good buddy. I will have to go through each of the 133 posts, change a pop-up menu, and manually delete the spam trackbacks. I’m certainly not turning trackbacks on ever again. They’re just not worth it.
From a product point of view, it’s clear that the pace of change for Moveable Type is very slow, and perhaps still slowing. It’s the hobbyist platform, or the “professional” platform, depending on your point of view. I imagine the license revenue is no where near seven figures (just a guess), and that TypePad, the hosted solution, is where all the cashflow comes from. They can make changes there and roll them out to tens of thousands of people in a few minutes.
The idea of running a public weblog is great. The reality is that there is a lot of grunt-work management. Perhaps the reality of all this management will motivate me to write more entries, otherwise why bother?