Waffle

Sorry to those of you who were eager to finally see comments here again; I'm behind in my work, so the blogkeeping I promised the other day will have to be postponed. The one response I got to my earlier message, from Pete Ashton (thanks, mate), urged me to put aside a decent chunk of time, which I won't be able to do until that damned page is finished.

Next weekend, I hope.

This weekend, I'll try to upgrade the blog software to Movable Type 3.2, un-b0rk the comments section and maybe even switch to a higher account level so I can invite more co-bloggers. I may fail (and break stuff in the process), but I will take some time to try. Comments are very much in demand, to the point where people have removed links to Waffle on their own sites out of frustration with the lack of comment functionality.

I may also switch to dynamic templates for the blog, which would be a big, big change indeed.
I hear that the new default templates for Movable Type 3.2 are very different (again) from the existing ones, and more complicated (again!). Because so much about the existing installation is broken, I am leaning towards backing up everything I got and doing a full install. Will it be worth the bother to work with the new templates or will I be better off using the old ones?

There are a few people with Movable Type blogs reading Waffle, if you could advise me, please email me. I promise that if my plans succeed, it will be the last time you'll have to email me for comments and advice; there will be shiny new comments!

By the way, there are even more overhauls planned in all the locations where I publish Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan. I can guarantee that these overhauls will be disruptive over a period of several days. Please bear with me - I promise I will report as best I can, with B-movie title clichés.

I don't know why a page from the comic is suddenly showing up at the top of the Waffle home page... it certainly doesn't appear in the posting interface's entry listings, the miniature indexes or in the RSS feed. It links to a broken archive within Waffle's archive space, but the permalink for it is the correct one for the Movable Type-based version of the webcomic.
I think Movable Type got a few screws loose. It's even quite possible that posting this will un-scramble things to the point where the faulty posting disappears. Let's see...
Update: Nope. Mysterious...

My account seems to have disappeared from Bloglines, and with it the published blogroll on the Waffle front page. Until Bloglines has answered my query about the problem to my satisfaction, I won't comment much on stuff found on other blogs, unless someone sends me links. If they don't answer my query to my satisfaction and I am forced to rebuild the blogroll and the loooong list of blogs I read, I might as well take the opportunity to rebuild it at a competing provider, if one can be found. Send hints and tips to reinder@despammed.com.

This could be a blessing in disguise, really, as it's one less distraction for me to be distracted by.

Add this one to the to-do list:
The blog's webhost, Xepher, says he's ready to start experimenting with allowing comments on Movable Type installations. I have not responded to that, because I haven't got MT-Blacklist working yet, and haven't spent a whole lot of time on it lately. But now MT-Blacklist's creator, Jay Allen, writes about a new despamming tool called SpamLookup, which he says is so good that

I've disabled MT-Blacklist and DSBL (but not MT-Moderate, which SpamLookup works with quite nicely and relies on for ping moderation) in favor of Spamlookup.

Sounds good, neh? I'll be in touch with Xepher some time next week.

Waffle has been hit hard by trackback spam in the past couple of days. Now, I could respond to this by trying again to set up MT-Blacklist and fix whatever prevents it from working as it should, but frankly, the blog gets very few legitimate trackback pings, and in any case, I'm no longer as interested in blogospheric juju as I was a year ago or so. So the easy way out for me is to disable trackbacks altogether, strip the trackback ping code out of the templates, and give the spammers the finger for good. I won't get a cool Technorati profile or a high place in the Blog Ecosystem with that attitude, but the sad spectacle of seeing bloggers whine about how "nofollow" would destroy blogging as we know it has lead me to believe that that aspect of the blogging experience is profoundly stupid and childish anyway. So gone are trackbacks, and good riddance. The archive pages will be leaner for the lack of all that stuff hidden in them.

The one reason to have trackbacks at all is to allow your readers to find interesting blogs that way. Since no interesting blogs ever ping this one, I don't see why I should expose the site to massive abuse in the vain hope of that ever happening.

Okay! Now the blog is finally back. I still need to improve the entry screens (after the events of the past couple of days, something has been chmodded so that I can't see images and logos inside the entry panels, and that annoys me a little bit), but the core functionality seems to be working. The bad news is that there will be no comments in the near future.
The one thing I didn't get to function was MT-Blacklist, and that's bad enough, but even if it did work, I'd be reluctant to switch comments back on. Just minutes after the last time I got the blog working, my Movable Type directory got flooded with comment spams, taking down not just the blog but the entire xepher.net host. Xepher responded by shutting down all MT intallations across the network. He has now kindly allowed me to switch everything on, except the comments, and I'm not going to press the issue right now because even if I get MT-blacklist working again, the load caused by the failed attempts at posting comment spams is enough to hose Xepher.net again.

In preparation for a day when I will want to try and switch comments on again, I have uploaded and installed MT-DBSL and Real Comment Throttle, as well as alerting Xepher to possible apache-side solutions and making a mental note of this Movable Type hack that automagically adds IP addresses to the IP ban list if they post crap that matches the blacklist — it may not be useful to me while the blacklist is kaput, but it will be useful some time.

I recommend that everyone with a Movable Type blog reads A Six Apart Guide to Fighting Comment Spam, Killing Comment Spam the Pete Way and Concerning Spam. But for now, no comments until we are sure we can deal with the consequences of crapfloods for the server. I will look at alternative community-building solutions.
And tart the blog up with avatars so it's easier to see who's posting.

Okay, the upgrade seems to be working. I hate the new look with (in Opera) impossibly narrow entry fields and no columns or buttons, but I expect that fixing the style sheet will not be too difficult.
Comments will remain switched off until I manage to import a master MT-Blacklist, which the system won't let me do for some reason. I expect that that will be difficult. If you have a tip or otherwise want to comment, send it to reinder@despammed.com.

Update: the entry page style sheet has been fixed, making that part of the site usable.
Also, I'm trying to get the RandomLine plugin to work again, so that quotes appear on top of the main index again.

Testing, again.

I tried to upgrade to MT 3.14 today. The upgrade got b0rked, badly, and I had to roll it back after 5 hours of alternately waiting for answers from Movable Type's support department and implementing their suggestions. They've been very helpful, but I have nothing to show for those 5 hours of my time, which considering how the rest of the week has gone is very discouraging.

I will try again when I have another few hours of uninterrupted idle time. This may not be soon. Until the upgrade is done, comments for new posts will continue to be set to "None" unless I have a good reason to allow them for any post. Not that I expect to put up many new posts either, because I'm a bit fed up with blogging for the time being.

Now let's post this and see if the system is still working as it should.