A couple of posts back, I talked about upgrading to Movable Type 3.2. I semi-promised to update when I had a better idea of how the new spam gizmos worked.

I now have this better idea. For a week now, since the upgrade, I’ve thought that Murphy’s Law was taking hold of the site and sending spammers elsewhere to prevent me from properly testing the new installation. Turns out I was wrong! While tooling around on the Comment screen of my MT control panel just now, I noticed a new tab that said “Junk Comments”. I clicked it, and lo and behold, HUNDREDS of spam comments that Movable Type 3.2 just quietly disposed of, never wasting my time alerting me of their presence. Needless to say, I’m thrilled. Now, not only is my site effectively battling evil spam, but it’s doing it 100% without any input or interaction with me at all. Not so much as an email! This is wonderful. It took me months to get MT Blacklist’s exception list full enough to have that effect, and now MT 3.2 has done it right out of the box. What a fantastic improvement to what was already really great software. Thanks Six Apart!

I just uh…”stumbled across” a copy of the Flock developer preview, and having messed around with it a little bit I can say for sure: it’s pretty cool.

Click the screen shot above for a bigger view. I really like the blogging features, and I can’t wait until they all work properly so I can test them more thoroughly, but this is very promising! It definitely makes the whole process very easy and intuitive, and it works just fine with Movable Type 3.2 for me, even though the site said it wouldn’t.

Most of my bookmarks aren’t things that anyone else would find interesting, or they’re work-related and thus not eligible for sharing, so the favorites-sharing features don’t really interest me, and I haven’t tried them.

I can vouch for the rest though. They took Firefox and prettied it up while adding some advanced functionality that isn’t really available via extensions or plugins at the moment, and thus is extremely valuable to those who have a blog or desire some of the community-oriented features that are present here. I’ll put some more screen shots up later on for anyone who is interested.

While adding a few new entries to my spam blacklist yesterday, I noticed that a new version of Movable Type had been released. 3.2, to be specific. I had been running 3.11 without issue for almost a year, so I didn’t really see any reason to go through the hassle of upgrading until I came across the new features list. 3.2 has some pretty hefty built-in spam fighting measures, so I couldn’t resist.

Even though MT-Blacklist has served me beautifully, and I have waxed amorously about its effectiveness more than once on here, I love messing with new gizmos. 3.2 has new spam gizmos, so I installed it. In keeping with Murphy’s Law, my site is experiencing a respite from spam since the new software was installed, so unfortunately I can’t yet know how good these new gizmos are. I will update as warranted, or far less than warranted, as usual.

P.S. - a few entries back, I mentioned that I had switched from Firefox to Maxthon, and pledged to explain why at a later date. I was reminded yesterday that I failed to do that, so here is the latest on my browsing equipment: I switched back to Firefox again. Originally, I quit using Firefox because of a memory leak in 0.6 or whatever version was current back then, which caused it to eventually eat my entire gig of ram. Maxthon served me well during that period, and I still use it today when I need IE6 for something. However, Firefox had its memory leak fixed, so I switched back. I also quit using the Moog builds, finding that I preferred to be bleeding-edge than a hair quicker. Currently, I’m using the Firefox 1.5 beta 2 build, and I like it quite a bit. Maybe soon I’ll do a post about my extremely tailored configuration, but that time is not now.

Spammers. We all know them and universally revile them. As a result, some of them develop anger problems, inferiority complexes, and all manner of issues. Lately my site and presumably many others have been seeing a massive surge in what’s called “nuisance spamming”, which is the act of spamming things like links to other, uninvolved people’s blogs for no reason other than to annoy the site owner.

As I’ve said before, and i’m sure i’ll say again before it’s all said and done, MT-Blacklist is just the greatest thing ever. As anyone who looks at the dates around here knows, I don’t pay much attention to this site currently. I haven’t posted in months, and rarely do I ever even check to see if there’s been new comments posted. A quick look around will demonstrate that even though more than 500 spam comments have been sent my way in the last couple of days, not so much as ONE has made it through my filters. They get zapped before they ever even see the light of day.

The moral of this story is that evil never triumphs. Keep trying guys, you obviously have a lot of free time on your hands.