The fight against comment and TrackBack spam is an ongoing battle, and it's worth reviewing some of the new options available for managing the attacks.

Since our last roundup, which covered many mod_security options as well as the DSBL plugin, some popular new choices have come to the forefront.

Cameron Marlow of Blogdex fame has created MT-Keystrokes, a proof-of-work plugin that requires human input and a javascript interpreter in the commenter's browser.

If you're facing TrackBack attacks, you'll want to enable the DSBL plugin (as well as MT-Blacklist, if you don't already have it) and a nice complement to these functions is MT-Moderate, which enables moderation of TrackBacks....

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Just launched is the new puptastic, a blog about dogs. Of course, every blogging niche needs two entrants, so puptastic joins Modern Pooch, also powered by Movable Type.

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We've just released Movable Type 3.01D. You can download the new version by logging into your Movable Type Account and using the "download" link for the appropriate license. If you're upgrading from 3.0D, there's no need to run any upgrade script for this release: just upload the files to your server and you should be ready to go!

This release fixes a number of bugs that were present in 3.0D. The lot of it boils down to this: • Comment preview is no longer dropped (see below for instructions) • Default templates now have valid HTML in a few places where they didn't before. • Lots of bugs fixed with export and import, and the primary category of an entry is included with an...

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We have released a new version of Movable Type, version 1.3. Existing users of versions 1.0-1.2 should use the upgrade distribution to update their MT installation, and should follow the upgrade instructions.

In addition to bug fixes and improvements to general stability, this release adds the following features: • XML-RPC server implementation of the Blogger API, so you can use existing XML-RPC clients to post to Movable Type ( more information) • Search and replace functionality ( more information) • Ability to specify the directory in which upload files are placed, rather than just dumping files into the archive directory ( more information) • Archive File Templates: the...

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Ning has just launched their namesake service. Though it meets all the superficial standards for Web 2.0 buzzword compliance, including tag clouds, a beta badge, and name-checks of Flickr and del.icio.us, it looks like there's some real substance to this new application-building platform as well.

Formerly known by some as 24 Hour Laundry, Ning is hard to sum up succinctly. But the core idea is that it's a service for building social software online. The best description on the site is in the Developer Documentation, which offers perhaps an overview of what's possible:

Developing your social apps on the Ning Playground has some advantages:

• App creation tools - including the ability to...

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Your Blogger Code is: B6 d+ t+ k s++ f- i o+ e l c-- ( decode it!)

What will they come up with next? According to The Blogger Code, "Geeks have one. So do hairy gay men and their admirers. Isn't it time bloggers have a code to describe themselves as well?". Want to understand someone's blogger code? Check the decoder.

Hat tip to Arvind of Movalog.

Copyright © 2004-2005 Elise Bauer. All Rights Reserved (unless otherwise specified).

Has this tutorial been helpful? Please consider linking to Learning Movable Type at http://www.learningmovabletype.com/ . Thanks!

Posted by Elise Bauer on November 08, 2004 to Weblog Goodies | Email to a friend |...

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So let's say you run a reasonably popular weblog that's open to comments from anyone and everyone. Let's also say in the same breath that you don't necessarily believe that turning off comments on older entries is a good way of squashing the comment spam problem, though it is terribly effective. For the sake of completeness, let's also say that you've bought into the idea that blacklists are inherently flawed, a losing proposition, and so you haven't bothered using them.

But let's also say that you have received a proportionately infinitesimal volume of spam despite it all, given how attractive a target your weblog must be.

What...

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Security expert Bruce Schneier, known for his best-seling book Beyond Fear, has just added his new weblog, powered by Movable Type 3.11. It's full of compelling writing even though it's only been running for a few days.

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Tagalag is a clever new service that lets you easiliy and securely assign tags to email addresses. And if yours is the email address that's tagged, you can claim your address and edit the tags that have been assigned.

We're especially happy to see that you can login with TypeKey to get started with the service, meaning you don't have to create another login just to try it out.

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Vauhini Vara of the Wall Street Journal has published a look at all the new blog search engines that have popped up in recent years, including Technorati, Feedster, IceRocket, DayPop, BlogPulse, Bloglines, and stalwarts such as Google, MSN, and Yahoo.

The challenge facing a lot of these search engines is outlined in the article:

The new services, some of which are less than a year old, aren't without their glitches. The technology is still evolving and companies are still looking for the best way to track and sort blogs. Some services miss large numbers of blogs, while others pull up irrelevant sites.

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Though we definitely don't recommend doing this unless you're an expert user who's certain of the security implications, Doug Bowman has described a very useful way of using Movable Type as a remote editor. For tweaking configuration files or other documents on a server, this can be a real time-saver.

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LivingDot, popular hosting service and one of our Movable Type Hosting Partners, has just announced the LivingDot TypePad Booster Package. This collection of services lets you add a domain name, email accounts, and additional disk storage to your TypePad account, and they'll even help map your domain name to your TypePad site.

If you (or your clients) are running a high-traffic TypePad site, or are doing a lot of media serving for things like podcasting, it's a great complement to the core TypePad service, and it's as little as an additional $7.95 per month.

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Having spent a few hours this morning researching and re-researching referrer spam among other things, I thought I'd throw some links out here.

Proposal on Referrer Spam Blocking Referrer Spam Referrer Spam Protection Using Blacklist on Referrer Spam Blacklist to Mod_Security

Related Entries:

Posted by Iki at May 8, 2005 09:04 AM

Comments

I started researching this subject a few months ago because my stats look like the porn industry puked all over them. Unfortunately, everything I came up with was totally greek to me. If you find a simple solution or even a "not so simple but not so damn hard solution" ... let me know. :) Posted by: Rogue at May 13, 2005 09:18 AM

Post a...

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Movable Type was originally built as a hobby, at a time when asking users to upgrade frequently was a fun part of participating in the blogging community, not a burden. At the time, there wasn't even an idea that blogging would become an industry.

In that environment, there were different expectations for the product. Commercial users were rare and most people who installed and used the product tended to be highly tech-oriented. Most people who have used Movable Type know its quirks and know how to work around them and there are little nagging issues that we, as early users and developers, have all grown to accept. Unfortunately, as a new generation of customers discover the platform,...

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Over on the Professional Network members blog, we've been regularly posting even more job listings for people with experience on Six Apart platforms, especially Movable Type. In the past week alone, there's almost a dozen new listings, and of course we regularly post job requests on the member mailing list as well.

If you're not already a Professional Network member, and you've got blog skills that you'd like to take advantage of to help build your business or just to make some extra money, you'll want to sign up or find out more about membership. Recent job listings have been requesting skills ranging from experience writing blogs to design and implementation to technical development...

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Question

When I try to rebuild my site, the window pops up that says "Rebuilding", but it never does anything.

Answer

Make sure you aren't running a product like ZoneAlarm or Norton Security. Firewall software and anything designed to interfere with popups can also interfere with the Movable Type application.

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EmailVerificationSecret

If you are exposing the mt-add-notify.cgi interface to users, allowing them to sign up for site update notifications, you should set this value to something that outsiders would not be able to guess. This allows Movable Type to secure the notification signup process so that visitors have to verify their email addresses.

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If you upgraded to 2.6 or 2.61, you need to upgrade immediately to 2.62. There is a security vulnerability in 2.6 and 2.61. If you have already upgraded, you can either download the upgrade distribution and perform a normal upgrade, or download the Author.pm file to replace the lib/MT/Author.pm on your server.

We're sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused. Because beta-testing with the number of testers we use makes it difficult to catch all bugs, we will most likely be implementing public beta tests in the future.

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SafeMode

"Safe mode" enables certain warnings about security and other issues, and turns off some small features and capabilities (for example, linking templates to files with .cgi and other extensions). Safe mode is on by default; you can turn it off by setting SafeMode to 0.

Default value: 1

Example: SafeMode 0

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Well call me just plain out of it. Or blame it on my complete lack of Unix chops. Either may be accurate.

Until now I've been bouncing off of NetSol and putting up with the ridiculous (and highly inaccessible) image-based security widget every time I've run a whois search on an existing domain.

Google just launched a whois search, which is cool in and of itself (although the prospect of more spam doesn't thrill me). What caught my attention though, was an off-the-cuff remark by Joi Ito:

I guess this is useful for people who won't touch a command line, but I don't think I'd ever use it. I will continue to open a terminal window and type...

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