Make that Coffee Irish
I have absolutely had it with comment spam and Movable Type.
There have been twenty-one server fails in the last twenty-two days and every single fail is the result of outdated Movable Type comment scripts.
I made the decision, silently, the other day that if overall system uptime since July fell below the threshold of 99.9% drastic action would be taken. As a result of the daily server failures this month that threshold did fall below 99.9%, an unacceptable situation.
I feel Movable Type is utter garbage, it is the McDonald’s of the blogging industry at five star restaurant prices. Major hosting companies, the sort that small companies like mine aspire to be someday, took action in December to disable Movable Type commenting. They did so because it was killing their scsi backed dual xeon servers with 4GB+ of RAM dead cold. I do not have the income to even fantasize about having such a server at the moment, but I also do not have the client based to warrant such horsepower either. It would be a tremendous waste of money.
I didn’t disable the scripts, I kept working on solutions (and finding they failed) to avoid doing so. I don’t feel it is fair to force users to shell out $70 to $100 because that’s what the Trott’s feel they deserve to bugfix older versions of the CMS. Even if they port those bugfixes back to the older versions, one must rely on the user to actually implement them… and as is evident, Windows server admins, whose sole career description is to implement bugfixes, consistently fail to do that… how can we expect casual bloggers to do it?
The final solution was inevitable. Regardless of how fair it is, no one user can be allowed to run software capable of disabling an entire webserver. There are free and superior alternatives, Wordpress is one of them. Users must either upgrade or change to a server-friendly CMS or their comment script will be disabled, it’s that simple.
I refuse to upgrade the webserver to deal with comment spam, it should not be necessary. I refuse to continue losing money because clients leave due to the server being down. I refuse to lose yet another night of sleep because of Movable Type. I refuse to allow Movable Type to destroy my company!
The worst thing, I’m deathly afraid of going on my little vacation this weekend, what if something horrible happens while I’m on the train in the middle of nowhere? Sure, there will be people watching things while I’m away, that is always the case, but this type of problem requires highly experienced server administrative skills to deal with.
February 23rd, 2005 at 4:24 pm
We’re sorry that the frustration with comment spam has made working with MT such a disappointing experience for you. As someone who does this sort of thing for a living, I’m sure you realize that, despite the attacks on MT, one of the reasons we think it’s still an excellent choice is because we *do* stand behind the application, and we do make updates to it, and we do respond to issues.
If you’re planning for a business, you have to know that you can rely on your tools, and I think that we do a great job of communicating about our strengths and weaknesses. That’s not to say we wouldn’t love to have zero vulnerabilities or bugs in the application, because of course that’s the goal, but the reality is that all software is going to have some flaws, and the bigger differentiator is whether you know if the tool’s provider will be as forthcoming about those shortcomings as they are about its strengths. I’d compare our record in that regard as favorable to anyone in the software industry.
Finally, you say “I refuse to upgrade the webserver to deal with comment spam, it should not be necessary.” I wish that were a viable solution in the long term, but I’m sure you’ll discover (regardless of blogging tool) that comment spammers are evolving their techniques and strategies far too quickly for that to be a realistic wish, at least in the short term.
Finally, I do think that switching costs are still far higher than upgrading costs, but as I’ve already rambled on in your comments long enough, I’ll be glad to let you email me if you’d like to talk about it more. Thanks for taking the time to give us feedback, even if it’s to let us know we haven’t been meeting your expectations.