Upgrade to MT 3.17 and SpamLookup

I finally upgraded to Movable Type 3.17 from 2.63 last week. So far I’m very happy with the move. I’m not using any of the dynamic publishing features, but will work on that in upcoming weeks. It definitely looks better than the old version, and the performance seems to be better, much snappier response.

I also disabled MT-Blacklist and started using SpamLookup and MT-Moderate. Jay Allen, the creator of MT-Blacklist, endorsed SpamLookup over his own tool and uses it himself. I figured that was as good an endorsement as you can get, so I tried it out. Well, Brad Choate has another winner here. Rather than just rely on blocking of URLs and keywords, SpamLookup checks for things like mismatched IPs, proxies, and blacklists, and has been very effective at stopping new sources of comment and Trackback spam.

As far as MT-Moderate, well, it moderates Trackbacks, something which you would expect MT to do by itself. But it doesn’t, so this plug-in is definitely a must-have!

Hopefully this will help stem the tide of this junk.