Waffle

Overnight, the SpamCatcher plugin on my Movable Type installation failed rather spectacularly, allowing some thirty spams to pass and get published without even getting flagged. Half of these were gibberish comments, which are very difficult to filter, but the other half were "Good site! Thanks, have some spam" comments, which the regular expression filter should have caught, but didn't. In other words, under conditions which apply to a small blog that only a handful of people post comments to, SpamCatcher can not be relied on to work properly. Bit of a disappointment, that.
Cleaning up spam takes a lot of time, especially because another misfeature of Movable Type is its resource hogging. Every rebuild of a post here comes close to hitting the resource limits Xepher.net imposed after a spam attack on this very MT installation took down the entire server two years ago. Mass rebuilds such as those I carry out after a spam cleanup hit those limits, causing the process to time out, so that the spam stays on the published site.

I really don't want to close comments, so instead I'll gradually escalate my spam defenses. Step one is raising the junk filter threshold, so that more things will get junked based on the probability of them being spam. This will not reduce the time spent looking over the comments in the backend, as I'll have to fish legitimate comments out of the junk folder, but it will cut down on mass rebuilds. It also won't make the regex-based filtering functional, but it should at least get me rid of the gibberish.

If it doesn't work well enough, I may hold all comments for moderation, or go to authenticated commenters only. Or as a last resort, I may switch off commenting again until an anti-spam system that works can be installed.

I'm even open to switching blog software, though this will also lead to me having to do work that I Really Don't Want To Do. I'm unimpressed with WordPress, because it's a single-blog system that you need to arm-twist and wrangle into doing multi-blogging, but there may be other systems that do what I want a blogging application to do.

The keyword blacklisting in Movable Type has one little drawback: it doesn't work. I've added several variants of "Good Site! Thanks!" including "ood site! Thank" to the blacklist but spams containing those phrases continue to get posted. Update: I've boned up on regular expression syntax and the rules for whole-word blacklisting, and it works well now.

Worse than that, because of Movable Type's insane resource consumption, forced mass rebuilds after a spam cleanup sometimes hit Xepher's resource limits, causing them to time out and the rebuild to fail, meaning that the spams don't get deleted from the posted entries (though they do get deleted from the database). This is Not Acceptible.

Worse, the filter's performance seems to be worsening. Spams that automagically get junked still outnumber spams that don't, but not nearly by as much as they did a month ago. I've got bad experiences with learning filters (Opera's, for instance, tends to learn it wrong even though I'm pretty damned dilligent about catching any spam the filters don't, and marking it as such before deleting it); I don't know which part of the setup is failing to learn about spam, but one of them is. Maybe it's not updating its blackhole list.

This weekend, I'm going to beef up the anti-spam defenses, installing Akismet and everything else that I can find that might block it. Until then, don't be surprised if you suddenly find comments closed across the blog. I'm leaving them open on this one in case someone wants to suggest a neat anti-spam trick or plugin, though.

BTW Trackbacks have already been shut off again, probably for good this time. I've switched off sending trackbacks as well, except possibly to the aggregators that Movable Type auto-pings.

The new File Uploader in Movable Type can make thumbnails! So I can now do this:

and show you previews that still fit within the blog column on the ROCR.net front page. This means that:
1) my search for a better file uploader (in which the only one that looked promising enough to try was for-pay) yesterday was a waste of time; and
2) I don't need to give people complicated instructions for how to post an image without breaking the front page layout. Yay!

Ladies and gentlemen, we have comments. Try them!

If you read Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan, you'll undoubtedly have seen the occasional "Coloured by DFG" discreetly announced below an archived ROCR comic. Drooling Fan Girl, as she's known to the webcomics-reading public, is the comic's most frequent guest colourist. She's a very vocal, argumentative and at times eccentric presence in webcomics-related forums and IRC channels as well. Starting the 19th, DFG will alternate colouring duties on the next ROCR story, provisionally entitled "Attack of the Nightmares" until I can find a title that doesn't suck, with second colourist Mravac Kid.

I did some research and found that there were no technical restrictions on this Movable Type installation. The license restricted me to five authors, but I've just gone to Movable Type's site and accepted the new license which allows me to have more.

So welcome, Jelena Stellaard, to this blog. Jelena has been my studio-mate for the past year. She's a cartoonist, a musician and a geek, so we get along like a house on fire. Jelena has been asked to teach a series of cartooning workshops similar to the workshops I teach, and I asked her a while ago to write about her experiences in this blog like I've been doing with mine. Not that she'll be restricted to posting about teaching, of course.

The second new blogger I'll invite is my other studio-mate, Calvin Bexfield. Calvin is the new background artist for Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan whose meticulous drafting and design you'll enjoy (that's an order!) starting in March. DFG got there first!

I don't know where I'd heard that Movable Type was free again, but it evidently wasn't on Movable Type's own site. If anything, their rates seem to have gone up from what I remember. This is a bit of a bummer, because I'd been looking to upgrade. I want to add two new bloggers (my studio-mates Jelena Saiso and Calvin Bexfield), which requires a non-restricted version of the software. I also want to re-enable comments, which requires the latest and greatest in anti-spam provisions, otherwise all of Xepher.net goes down again. I could of course move to WordPress or even WillowCMS, but I have two good reasons to stick with Movable Type:
1. I hate it when URLs change, and don't have time to hunt through old blog entries to change links to the new URLs;
2. Fielding support questions from my co-bloggers is difficult enough without having to learn a new interface myself. I'm not a Movable Type expert and have to look for answers in the Help pages and my own old template code, but at least I am usually able to find the answer. In WordPress, I'd know no more than the user asking the question. In WillowCMS, I'd know a little more than my users, but frankly, I'm unwilling to let other people onto my Willow installation until there's a simplified interface they can use. Otherwise I'd be answering questions all day, or rather, Mithandir would be answering them for me, which would be a terrible way to thank him for the work he's done. And there's so many things I haven't got around to implementing that a Willow-ed version of the blog would need. It would have advantages in terms of comic/blog integration though.

Bummer. What to do? Looks like I've got a bullet to bite here - actually, upgrading Movable Type after more than two years would be hair-raising enough considering what happened the last time.

What Tom Coates describes here also happened to me when I upgraded to Movable Type 3.14 late in 2004.

When they try and login, the server basically falls over completely. A forced restart, and I hold my breath a little. When it comes back, they dig into the logs and it becomes immediately obvious to them what's going on. Hundreds – thousands – of requests every minute for a file called mt-comments.cgi – the part of Movable Type that deals with incoming comments to my weblog. My entire site has been quite directly, and clearly spammed to death.

Every once in a while I consider bringing back comments on Waffle, possibly after upgrading to a newer version of Movable Type. Then I think "Naaah." I didn't get too many anyway, and restoring the feature would require quite a lot of work up-front and also bring along with it an ongoing responsibility to maintain it - keeping it functional and spam-free. Life's too short.

WillowCMS, on which the comic's archive runs, has comments, and seems to be holding up well under the onslaught of spamming attempts. But should it buckle under, I don't think I would wait very long to cut my losses and switch off comments.

It looks like trackbacks on Waffle have suddenly, spontaneously become un-borked. Straaaaange. Seems to have happened in mid-November for no good reason at all.

For a guy who writes about music a lot, I don't have many music links on my blogroll. This is more of a historical accident than anything else; when I started blogging, I looked around for other blogs about music, and it turned out that many of the interesting ones were done by people who were desperately unhappy, clinging to music for the emotional support needed to make their lives worth living, but unable to lift themselves out of misery. I am convinced that music has that power to sustain people and even to turn lives around, but you couldnt' tell from the ones that I had taken an interest in that it was more than a refuge to them. They made for such painful reading that I had to stop following them to avoid getting sucked in. I assumed that that was what music blogging was like - just like political blogging encourages people to become shriller and more partisan over time, music blogging, I thought, kept its bloggers treading water emotionally.

That Girl Needs Therapy doesn't give off that vibe at all. I stumbled upon it repeatedly through Technorati and the last time I did it had a nice comment about my blog in a post, plus author Tatgoddess posts many interesting mp3s for her readers to sample. I will be checking out Nouvelle Vague on the basis of their cover of PIL's "This is Not a Love Song" (the original of which I initially hated until I acquired a taste for John Lydon's singing) , for example. TGNTL is now on my blogroll.

Speaking of John Lydon, he's got a nice interview in the Dutch magazine Oor, December issue, in which he mentions that he doesn't hate Pink Floyd actually, talks about how childhood meningitis affected him and comes across as a moderate, easy-going sort of guy. Who'd have thunk it?