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

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!