Comments Resolved
Okay, I’ve fixed the error in the comments that kept giving people a “comment-pending template missing” message. It should now give you a message telling you that your comment is waiting for moderation. The comment system should be working fine now.
The new blog setup is also working fine. MT-Blacklist is blocking most of the comment spam coming in (about 500 spams daily!) and SpamLookup is blocking the Trackback spam (another couple hundred every day), while the blacklist patch to AwStats actually seems to be successful in blocking most of the referral spam, though it doesn’t stop the initial flood from beginning before I can add the keywords to the spam blacklist. So my spam moderation has dropped to just a few per day, and my statistics, while still flooded with spam, aren’t nearly as choked as they used to be. That’s livable. I shudder to think what it would be like if none of these spam filters were available–comments would have to be shut down completely.
Still, comment moderation, while it works and keeps spam out, is less than perfect due to the wait involved for the comment to appear. Using Typekey would solve that problem, but many don’t want to suffer the hassle needed to set up the account, which I can fully understand. So, if you post here even semi-frequently, feel free to ask me to set up a Typekey account for you–just leave a comment asking that. I’ll hand it over to you via email (I’ll give you an address to contact me at if I don’t know yours), giving you the username and password. Then you just click the “sign in” link next time you leave a comment, insert the username/password, have your browser remember the info, and from then on in it’s automatic. That should make commenting easier than before, and the same Typekey account can be used to comment in any other blog using Movable Type 3.1.
Any comments, suggestions or observations about the site?
I perfer white background colors. The dark color to the right of the main body column is a bit distracting. Also, if you add some color (blue, red, green) to the headlines, it might make it a bit more colorful.
Correct me if I am wrong. The referer spam patch doesn’t really prevent spam from sucking up your bandwidth. It just prevents it from showing up in your awstats right?
To be entirely honest, I’m not even sure about that. The patch is sketchy in terms of documentation. But if I had to guess, I would guess that it only filters out the data, and does not block it.
However, I don’t mind that–my current web hosting account gives me 75 GB of bandwidth per month, and I’m only using maybe 15 GB currently, so things would have to get a lot worse.