redshifter.org

Movable Type's comment system is cool, but for those of us who are geeky/control-freaky enough to want to custom build our own weblog rather than use an off-the-shelf solution, it opens us up to receiving assloads of spam. redshifter.org was getting to the point where it was receiving hundreds of bogus comments per day, advertising all manner of nefarious junk. I had some plug-ins to catch them, but I was still getting email notification of new comments, mainly to catch legitimate comments that people may have posted to old threads.

Today I got notification from my hosting provider that I was getting so many emails (mainly spam from commenters) that they were shunting off emails into holding tanks because I was hitting my daily limit (which is a very high number). I knew the time had come to turn off email notification from my weblog, even if it risked not seeing new comments to approve to old threads.

So, I unchecked the checkbox in my Movable Type preferences and rebuilt. No big whoop. UNTIL I HIT MY SITE AND EVERY FUCKING COMMENT ON THE WEBLOG IS DELETED. As in gone. Gone from the database. Forever. No, I haven't backed up my site in a while.

I'm so goddamn pissed right now I can hardly type. Movable Type has been so focused on their growth and buying LiveJournal and trying to be top dog in the weblog world that they've completely dropped the ball with comments, one of the main draws to running a weblog. I'm sure they're working on something, but for now it's straight-up BUSTED, not to mention whatever bug caused toggling email notification to wipe the entire SQL table.

Yeah, you can post silly "me too" comments or start flame wars or bitch about the author's tastes, but comments are legitimate discussion -- my Dr. Jang, Scintillating Scotoma and buildup to Iraq posts are good examples of that. I was sorta looking forward to coming back and hitting my site in 15 years and reading the conversations. Guess not.

Seething with anger.

UPDATE: I got a lot of emails regarding Google's cache of the pages with comments. Thanks for those. Truth is, I just don't want to deal with it at this point. Lesson learned -- I need to export a backup more frequently. (My last was in September of 2004).