I know everyone picks on MT for comment spam. They tend to get the Microsoft treatment about their products. They are the no.1 standalone blogging software, it’s only logical they would be targeted by spammers.
That said, however, it still irks me to no end that they haven’t implemented some real tools to fight the spam. MT-Blacklist is awesome, but only until a breach is found. Then it takes the only developer a long time to patch it. Worse for Six Apart, they have old installations out there that have upgrade instructions scary enough that even I thought twice about doing it.
(Sorry, quick aside here, but their installation instructions fail to tell you to upload the Javascript library. Yeah, things don’t work too well when that’s missing
Anyway, why do I post a beef about Six Apart on a MT-powered blog? Because I’m expecting to get a letter like Ken Camp did anytime from my host. I’m surprised this hasn’t happened with more hosts.
My installation is currently in the clear in the situation above. But I fully expect comment spam to be back. For all the chest thumping and high-fiving the development circle-jerkers had when the nofollow hack came out, there will be a way around it. Spammers always find a way (the bastards).
And every day that letters like the above go out, more people will do what Ken did; switch. WordPress has a new version out with some pretty impressive features. I have too much invested in the conversion back to MT, so I’m not quite ready to make the jump. But the option is tempting, and I know from experience the switch to WordPress is almost too simple.
Get it together, Six Apart. You’re not Apple; fanaticism only goes so far.