Comment spam solution
It seems like just about all of the Movable Type bloggers are getting really, really fed up with comment spam. Luis, Jeremy, and MJ (just to name a few) have all had posts about it recently. There’s a simple solution to this problem, folks: Switch to ExpressionEngine! This site has been comment-spam free ever since the EE upgrade. EE comes with a number of features that all but guarantee that comment spam is not a problem.
Go ahead, broaden your blogging horizons. It won’t hurt. You might even like it.
Hiya Sako
Well I’m not particularly beholden to any blogging software - I’ve used MT, pmachine - and have been looking at Expression Engine - on different projects.
I’ve been pretty happy using mt - I think the solution to the issue is to solve the actual problem of comment spam - not just switch to another blogging software.
I’ve been hit with all types of spam lately - mail, keitai, blog - it seems that no matter how many tricks and filters you put in place the bastards work out a way to get through. No matter what the medium you just have to try and stay ahead of the game. Or repair and play catch up.
(^^)
I don’t really expect anyone to make the switch simply because I recommend it, but EE is really quite nice.
A little bit of diversity in the Gaijin blogosphere wouldn’t hurt, though, you know? Any bloggers you talk to in this part of the world seem to automatically assume that blogging means using MT—as if there were no other options! There are other options, ones that don’t get comment-spammed all day, every day.
I see that Zachary is looking into a new blogging system. Maybe he’ll start a trend.
Any way around EE’s $149 price tag? EE stands as the most expensive blog software, with pMachine being next at $45; all others have free versions.
MT 3.0 has come out, I believe with a registration engine for comments, that might do just as well. Thoughts?
Well, yes, pMachine.com is running a switch campaign for users of other blogging tolls.
Also, I see that MT now has the same $149 price tag (soon to be $189.95?) for personal use, along with a limit of 13 authors. (And $599.95 for commercial use—with a limit of 20 authors!) I would argue that this makes is considerably more expensive and more limited than EE.
Sure, free versions are nice, but at what point do people begin to feel a sense of obligation to support the developers of these tools? You have been using MT every day for more than 300 days now, right? Is your blog not worth fifty cents a day?
Actually, the comment registration engine may very well take care of the problem, as you suggest. My enthusiasm for EE actually stems more than just the fact that it is largely comment spam-free. That’s just a bonus.
I’m in the process of switching over to EE, but one thing I can’t figure out how to do is close off all my MT comments (I’m leaving it in place as an archive, although I’m importing everyting into EE as well) so I don’t continue to get spammed even though I’m no longer on MT anymore.
Of course, MT makes no provision for closing out more than one comment at a time.
Sako: The $149 price tage is merely the most expensive, as I’m sure you know—$69 is the cheapest paid version, and the free version is still usable by most people. Granted, the commercial price is most expensive, but I was referring to the cheapest price every package offered, not the most expensive, and though you can get MT for free, you have to shell out $150 clams for EE—no economy version for that one. I agree about supporting the developers—and I do pay for a great deal of my software, for example Ecto, which I use to blog with. But if the product is offered free, and I don’t see anything wrong with using it that way—and my needs are simple enough that any one of the many free packages will do the job for me.
Correction, I forgot to edit: “The $149 price tage is merely the most expensive” should be followed by “personal version of the software.” Sorry.
(Any reason not to allow anonymous comments here, by the way, so I don’t have to fill in my email every time? Just curious.)
Zachary writes:
I’m in the process of switching over to EE…
Woo hoo, a convert!
Luis writes:
[I]f the product is offered free, and I don’t see anything wrong with using it that way—and my needs are simple enough that any one of the many free packages will do the job for me.
There’s nothing wrong with that for your purposes.
I often help organizations use blogs as content-management tools (which more and more of them are evolving into), so I really need to have access to the full feature set to be able to make good recommendations.
Any reason not to allow anonymous comments here, by the way, so I don’t have to fill in my email every time? Just curious.
Any reason not to check the “Remember my personal information” box so that you don’t have to fill in that information every time? Likewise, just curious.
I do, except it doesn’t hold so well, as I tend to end cookies at the current session for privacy’s sake.
I haven’t had any spam bots for awhile. even though I am using the same domain name. I did upgrade and do some path changes. Maybe that is keeping the bots at bay….
Dave
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