Powazek
Powazek

Hooray for Movable Type!
Just a thought from 15 January 2004 about .

This is a geek heavy day, I know, but I had to add one more....

Movable Type 2.66 is out and it adds a few features designed to fight the rising tide of comment spam. (For the non-geeks, "comment spam" refers to evil people who use programs to post ads for their sites in the comments of Movable Type-powered sites. Mostly they do this to increase their page rank in Google, because Google smartly uses incoming links to determine the importance of a page. Anyway....)

A while back, I stepped up onto a soapbox and blamed Google for the plague of comment spam. I still believe it to be true, but I doubt Google will ever see it that way, so it's up to us to fix it. And fix it we shall.

The new version of MT includes some smart ways for the program to stop spammers. For example, how often does a human post 12 times in a second? Never. So why let any poster do so? This new version will put a stop to abusive comment spam bots.

But the feature I'm stoked about is now the links that authors add to their name in comments will not link directly to their sites. Instead, they'll redirect first, effectively eliminating the Google PageRank boost this kind of spam was giving to the spammers.

This shows, once again, that Ben and Mena aren't just making a great product, but they're looking out for the health of weblogs and the web in general. Bravo, guys. Bravo.

If you run a Movable Type-powered site with comments on, I urge you to upgrade now!

Wha?
This section is called Just a Thought. It's a blog where I post little pieces of what I'm thinking about at the moment. This page is an individual entry called “Hooray for Movable Type!” that I wrote on 15 January 2004.

Before this, I wrote a little something called “KnowSpam 200k” on 15 January 2004. After this, I wrote “Go see Big Fish” on 19 January 2004.


BEFORE
KnowSpam 200k
It's been under three months since my KnowSpam ticker hit 100k, and sometime last night it hit 200k. Since I...
15 January 2004

AFTER
Go see Big Fish
[Cross-posed from Storyblog because, really, I mean it.] If you're someone who likes great stories, if you're someone who's spent...
19 January 2004




The Fine Print

Working the web since 1995, Derek Powazek is the creator of many award-winning websites, a couple of which still exist. Derek is the cofounder of JPG Magazine and the CCO of 8020 Publishing. Derek lives in San Francisco with his wife, two nutty Chihuahuas, a grumpy cat, and a house full of plants named Fred. More »

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