Comments

Since I’m under deadline, I’m messing around with my weblog configuration.
Weblog commenting is totally broken. I just deleted 5,835 junk comments, all spammed since Thanksgiving. Then I went into the approved comments and find that there are 3,300 of them, when in fact only between 300 and 800 are valid. So I’ll have to manually delete those over the next few weeks, in small batches so I don’t become a serial killer.
I should probably do what Chris and Ashley recommended two years ago, which is to use Haloscan for comments. Or I should at least upgrade to Moveable Type 3.33 – but since they don’t appear to address any of the comment management problems, who cares what other new features there are? I don’t have 15 minutes a day to delete this crap from clueless people who think they’re going to get rich vandalizing websites.
For now, I’ve turned on TypeKey authentication, which probably won’t solve the problem but may reduce it dramatically. That means you have to register with them in order to comment here. Sigh. Not many people comment anyway, especially since the summer when I ran out of energy to engage commentators and keep the conversation alive.
It seems to me like keeping Moveable Type crippled like this is a good way to drive “upgrades” to TypePad, the paid hosted service that Six Apart offers. That’s very annoying, and there’s no solid evidence, save for the snail’s pace of MT improvements over the past three years. They are ignoring the biggest hassle of running a weblog today.
It wasn’t like this in 1998, I tell ‘ya.
Update: Great, now TypeKey says I haven’t signed up for this (free) feature. But the weblog key matches they key they display on my configuration profile. Oh well, maybe I’ve broken comments completely. Which is possibly better than deleting the vandalism every day…..
Update 2: CRAZY! In the TypeKey setup, you have to have a trailing slash after the URL. Even I can friggin’ write Perl to add one if it’s not present!! How un-friendly is that??
Update 3: Okay, once I have “trusted” a commenter it appears to work. Wish us luck!