Movable Type, the blogging engine whose hopelessness in dealing with spam drove me to use WordPress ... has just had a major update. According to the features page (emphasis is mine):
Movable Type helps people connect to your weblog and to each other, using comments or TrackBacks. A powerful Junk Folder automatically keeps your feedback on-topic and constructive without imposing a management burden on the blog owner. There's no spam on your blogs, by default. And you can let readers respond to individual weblog posts or manage content submitted through comments and TrackBack for all of your blogs at once.
According to Neville Hobson (via Weblog Tools Collection, via our WP Dashboards), the new edition is disappointing - apart from anything else, the documentation is incomplete. It will take an awful lot to win back people who've fled MT for WordPress - if indeed that is a good thing, given that Wordpress is a mature and reliable piece of software with distinct advantages over MT. What does MT actually learn from Wordpress's success - does MT 3.2 have, for example, two-level word-based spam blocking?
I'm actually considering getting rid of my stale Drupal site and restarting Blogistan (the name people persistently give this blog, ignoring the title at the top!) as a Muslim group blog, with a UK focus (this after all has a .uk domain) allowing for occasional international contributors. (If you'd like to contribute, please email me ... the address is at the bottom of the "About this blog" page which can be found on the left sidebar.) I'd like to at least try out MT 3.2, and that offer - the unlimited personal edition for $69.99 (ã39.08 at current exchange rates) - looks distinctly tempting.
But there's a problem. Six Apart has a UK site offering the unlimited version for ... ã54.99. You can buy the "Personal Edition", for five authors and unlimited blogs, for ã39.99 ... that's 91p more than the unlimited version from the US site. Is that offer not open to us Brits? Or have they just forgotten to update their UK site?
The UK site will be updated as soon as 3.2 is released in the U.K. All of our European editions get localized/localised help and ticket support, and that's our requisite before we consider the version "released" in a given region. So, the current version in the U.K. is 3.17, and the pricing reflects that. It shouldn't be long until 3.2 is out in the U.K., since of course the language translation is simple.
And to be clear, Neville's feedback is that he was frustrated with a particular plugin that's just been released. And he's new to Movable Type in general. So, though Weblog Tools Collection is always going to feature a negative headline like that one, versus the dozens of positive TrackBacks on our announcement post, the real story is that people are overwhelmingly amazed by the good experience of MT 3.2.
As to your specific question, "does MT 3.2 have, for example, two-level word-based spam blocking?" -- Movable Type does a lot better than that. First, there's a feedback scoring system, that assigns scores to trackbacks and comments as they come in, rating them by a series of tests whcih can include simple word-based or more complex behavioral rules. Next, comments or TrackBacks which are rated as questionable are sent to a Junk Folder. That folder automatically deletes junk after a set period of time by default, but it also means that you can rescue items that are marked as false positives and help your scoring system learn what is and isn't spam.
In other systems, someone saying "I'm a specialist" could get blocked because you had a word list with the word "cialis" and you as the site owner would never know, and the commenter would get frustrated. That never happens with MT. Finally, the scoring system lets you assign *positive* scores to items as well, using rules. So you can recognize the commenters who add the most value, across ALL of your weblogs, and encourage good behavior.
That's probably the most important point: You can manage all of your blogs in one place, with one simple set of user interfaces. Give it a try and I think you'll see nobody else is offering that kind of experience right now.
The UK site will be updated as soon as 3.2 is released in the U.K. All of our European editions get localized/localised help and ticket support, and that's our requisite before we consider the version "released" in a given region. So, the current version in the U.K. is 3.17, and the pricing reflects that. It shouldn't be long until 3.2 is out in the U.K., since of course the language translation is simple.
And to be clear, Neville's feedback is that he was frustrated with a particular plugin that's just been released. And he's new to Movable Type in general. So, though Weblog Tools Collection is always going to feature a negative headline like that one, versus the dozens of positive TrackBacks on our announcement post, the real story is that people are overwhelmingly amazed by the good experience of MT 3.2.
As to your specific question, "does MT 3.2 have, for example, two-level word-based spam blocking?" -- Movable Type does a lot better than that. First, there's a feedback scoring system, that assigns scores to trackbacks and comments as they come in, rating them by a series of tests whcih can include simple word-based or more complex behavioral rules. Next, comments or TrackBacks which are rated as questionable are sent to a Junk Folder. That folder automatically deletes junk after a set period of time by default, but it also means that you can rescue items that are marked as false positives and help your scoring system learn what is and isn't spam.
In other systems, someone saying "I'm a specialist" could get blocked because you had a word list with the word "cialis" and you as the site owner would never know, and the commenter would get frustrated. That never happens with MT. Finally, the scoring system lets you assign *positive* scores to items as well, using rules. So you can recognize the commenters who add the most value, across ALL of your weblogs, and encourage good behavior.
That's probably the most important point: You can manage all of your blogs in one place, with one simple set of user interfaces. Give it a try and I think you'll see nobody else is offering that kind of experience right now.
In my experience Movable Type is effective against comment spam, but powerless in the face of a concerted onslaught by trackback spammers.
In my experience Movable Type is effective against comment spam, but powerless in the face of a concerted onslaught by trackback spammers.
Rafael: yes, that was my experience and why I switched. I'm testing out MT 3.2 right now (mt instead of blog in the URL).
Rafael: yes, that was my experience and why I switched. I'm testing out MT 3.2 right now (mt instead of blog in the URL).