Well, I woke up this morning to find that in the hour and a half before getting up I'd received 558 comment-spams, and they were still coming in from multiple IP addresses.
chmod 000 mt-comments.cgi
Having disabled comments, I then start the long process of deleting 558 spams from 36 different posts.
I know, I should be running the latest version of MT2.6 with comment-throttling turned on. I looked into this a while back, It seemed you had to do an awful lot of work1 to get everything working effectively, even significantly more effort than it took to mechanically delete all that spam over breakfast.
What I want is new blogging software. I've wanted it for a while because Moveable type has started to annoy me. To fix the annoyances would involve writing Perl, which always makes me feel dirty2. Now that MT2.6 is a dead-end, and MT3.0 will want to charge me for silly things like adding authors to my Quicklinks blog, the switch seems inevitable.
I shudder at the time I have to invest in moving away from MT. I don't like fiddling around with installation and configuration at the best of times. If I switch, then before I can hack in any improvements, I'm going to have to spend however long it takes getting a new piece of blogging software to get to the state where it does exactly what this one does already: a massive investment of effort to stand in one spot.
Also, I'm way too picky.
- I don't want to switch to another Perl platform. Perl is icky2.
- I don't want to switch to PHP. PHP is truly icky2.
- I can't really spare the server resources for a Java appserver.
- I don't want to switch to anything that won't let me keep my permalink URLS exactly as they are (no more redirects thankyou, I still have to maintain all the annoying redirects from when I last moved my blog).
Hello Inertia, my old friend.
1 Hopefully, Shelley won't get too worried when a Google search for "Burningbird throttling" shows up in her referrer logs.
2 This is my opinion. You're welcome to your own, differing opinion so long as you don't feel that your opinion invalidates my right to have one.
