Ah, it’s been a long time since I’ve used the old “Metablog” category, hasn’t it? After a long and arduous process, I have finally updated Movable Type from 2.64 to the ultra-modern 3.32. Unfortunately, the process has not been without its share of problems.
The primary impetus for this upgrade was the amount of spam clogging this site. I had a blacklist plugin that would filter out spam, but I had to constantly babysit it, adding new spam entries and deleting old comments on a daily basis. If I ever fell behind, it became an arduous process to weed out the spam while simultaneously keeping the gems of opinion from my few trusted friends.
Luckily, my web hosting service came to my rescue by moving my site to a new server without telling me. This resulted in a broken site. After I figured out the problem and fixed it, my site worked again, but the blacklist database became corrupted. I had no way to mass-delete comments. I could delete them one by one, but at ten seconds apiece (and that’s being generous), I was looking at over three 24-hour days of deleting, since I had something like 25,000 comments to go through.
In more recent versions of Movable Type, the comment system has become more robust, with authentication being the primary method of keeping out the digital riff-raff. So from now on, you will need to register a Typekey account before you can comment. I hope it doesn’t cause you too much inconvenience.
Sadly, in the process of upgrading to 3.3, I somehow lost all my old comments. I am still trying to find out how to get them back. I guess it’s good because now I don’t have to plow through the old comments to delete them all, but bad because I lose all of your wit and wisdom. For that, I am sorry. Hopefully I can figure out a way to salvage them. But until them, please enjoy the new, spam-free site! I will try to keep posting in a timely manner, so keep reading!
