And since we're talking about freedom of expression, let's chat about spam.

Actually, comment/trackback spam has been nearly flat on this site since I implemented Typekey as well as MT-Blacklist. Which means, despite the added inconvenience, comment registration has done its job (and MT-BL has been doing its thing as well for the trackback side of the house) -- all without, evidently, breaking the hosting servers.

Actually, the first thing that actually got through in a while happened today -- some trackback spam from a gambling site masquerading under the URL "united in christ church.org" (without the spaces) -- which is probably going to incur some additional Wrath beyond that ordinarily expressed by mere mortals toward spammers. Not that I expect it to daunt the spammers.

Which brought me over to Jay Allen's site for the first time in a few weeks, where he talks about ... MovableType 3.2. Yowzers! Among the features he highlights:

• Trackback moderation/editing. This may be too late, since it seems the majority of sites that had Trackback running have turned it off (this blog being an exception), but it may also make it safer for folks to come back into the water and make use of this powerful interlinking tool.
• A feedback rating system, which will work on a variety of rules and previous feedback info to let you do ... stuff. Anti-spam stuff is mentioned, but presumably other sorts of results can come for good scores on comments/trackbacks. This one will take some reviewing.
• A junk folder. You can set things up (like the feedback rating system) to push stuff into Junk, where it will, by default, get deleted after 14 days (rather than having a ton of unmoderated comments/trackbacks sit out there forever).
• A system overview control panel. Now you can see most recent comments/trackbacks/posts across all blogs in your installation. Very handy in some cases.

And more. This is being touted as a feature-driven release, vs. a code-cleanup release like the original 3.x and even 3.1 were. Nifty.

Current thoughts are that 3.2 should be out by the end of the month.

Filed under :: Blogging :: Spam