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.