Les Jones

Blogging > Quick Notes on Movable Type 3.2

Bad news first: the upgrade from 2.6x is more of a pain than it should be.

The rest of the news is all good. Version 3.2 found all of my posts and comments. The new features are nice.

• Assigning a post to multiple categories is much easier.
• You can set the date and time on a new post without saving it to draft first.
• Formatting shortcuts now work in Mozilla and Firefox.
• Manual trackbacks no longer require a trip to another screen.
• Trackbacks can be managed without additional software.
• Spam filtering is built-in (see below).
• Composition page is roomier, and you can now have Save and Preview buttons at the top and bottom of the page.
• You can rebuild individual entries.
• Plug-in management has gone from non-existent to pretty darned good.
• The new "no-follow" plugin makes it pointless for spammers to post links to your blog in an attempt to increase their Google PageRank.

Spam filtering

Out of the box the spam filtering wasn't all that great. The new software has keyword filtering, blacklist filtering vis spam lookup services, and URL filtering (based on the presence of a certain number of URLs in the post, and whether those URLs have been posted previously). Adjusting the scoring helped some, but what really helped was copying and pasting my old MT-Blacklist entries. I've included them in the extended entry below. That has greatly reduced comment spam, and eliminated trackback spam.

Overall, I'm happy with the ugprade.

LATER: Here's the MT-Blacklist entries as a file Posted by lesjones | TrackBack