MovableType 3.14 released

December 21, 2004 · Comments

This is an example of how to respond to an issue. Months ago I made the decision to stick with [Six Apart's](http://www.sixapart.com) [MovableType](http://www.movabletype.org) despite the bruhaha over the pricing. I figured the dust would settle, Six Apart would figure things out and all would be well.

I don’t have to recap the problem of comment spam. It’s a big issue in the blog world, and some are getting attacked worse than others. My site gets its fair share of comment spam, having been around for nearly 2 years with a 5 PageRank, as many blogs are. Interestingly enough, when I moved to the new server I relocated my MT cgi files so the bots trying to find my comment script files were looking in the wrong place. It doesn’t stop them, but it appears to have slowed them down a bit. Only 25 spam attempts this week, which if you have a MT blog site you know is *nuthin’*.

So I decided not to bother making my templates dynamic. I’d like to try it one day just to know how to do it, but I didn’t think it was necessary now. Besides, [Dreamhost](http://www.dreamhost.com) was having some problems with the machine my MySQL database was on ::gulp:: so that wasn’t the time to be asking all site visitors to hit the database on every load, was it? The problems are fixed now, thankfully.

But back to Six Apart, and how they handled this “crisis.” Hosts and web site owners have been complaining a bit about how these blog sites with open comments are affecting server load. Everyone had assumed that the site owner had to shoulder some blame. Maybe they weren’t keeping an eye on their comments, maybe they didn’t have MT-Blacklist, maybe they were still running an older version of MovableType that didn’t have the moderation features now found in MT 3.x. Turns out, some sites were crashing down due to a bug in MT where the site was going through a rebuild even if the spam never made it through because the owner was doing everything he/she was supposed to do. Spammers rarely send one message at a time. I usually see 5-10 spam hits across different entries within a 30 second time period (sometimes from different IPs!). Some unfortunate sites get 1000 of these or more within a few minutes. A site trying to rebuild that fast can be crippled trying to keep up. Not only that, but if it’s a shared hosting set-up (as most are) then it brings down the victim site and like houses of cards connected by string, neighboring sites are compromised as well. It was a very messy situation that Six Apart obviously took seriously.

Six Apart put their top spam-knowing guy, Jay Allen, on the job by first announcing that they isolated the problem. Jay is now Product Manager for MovableType but he also wrote the MT-Blacklist software. Logical choice. He [announced](http://www.movabletype.org/news/2004/12/comment_spam_load_issue.shtml) in very clear, up-front language what the problem was and what they were doing about it. They laid out suggestions to allieviate the problem immediately. For sites hit hard, this is akin to being in a car accident in the woods, and the firefighter pokes his head in the car to say, “We found you. You’ll be okay. We’ll get you out.” You’re not out yet, but you feel better.

Almost at the same time, a testing version of the fix was announced on the [ProNet](http://sixapart.com/pronet/) members’ site. That way, those that are most familiar with MT could put the software through its paces. I didn’t test the fix because I wasn’t having the problem to the extent that my feedback would have been of much value, other than to confirm that it didn’t break anything.

Once the fix was tested, it was released with a [clear announcement](http://www.movabletype.org/news/2004/12/movable_type_314_release.shtml) on the main MT news page that just about everyone sees everytime they log into their own MT blog. Follow that up with Mena Trott’s heartfelt, “we still care about doing what’s right” post on her [personal blog](http://www.sixapart.com/corner/archives/2004/12/upcoming_releas.shtml). No one is happy about this bug or the fact that spammers are attacking our blogs, but I doubt anyone can fault how Six Apart responded to the problem. I’m glad I decided to stick with them.

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