Some of you may have noticed that Winds went down entirely for about an hour yesterday. We made major modifications to our infrastructure recently, in order to run Winds on a series of base platforms that were more CPU-friendly (Ubuntu/LightTPD not Red Hat/Apache, no more Virtuozzo or CPx control panel, which forced a hosting switch from the excellent folks at ServInt to our new friends at Pixelgate). That worked, and performance improved significantly. But yesterday... over to Ev:
"They called back and let me know what happened. It was a trackback spam attack so large, it drove the load average on the server so high that they couldn't even log in themselves without forcibly rebooting the box first. The spam attack resumed while I was on the phone with him, so I've disabled trackback. It's simply untenable to keep on, when it can disable the machine so badly that not only can't I log in, they can't log in when they're physically in front of the server."
We've killed trackbacks now, and they'll stay dead. Movable Type's approach to dealing with trackback & comment spam is fundamentally non-scalable, which means it's fundamentally broken in an age of cheap CPUs and no consequences for spammers. Worse, their security flaws forced us to migrate to MT 3.3 (and the only CAPTCHA system that works with it, plus the unfixable author link limit annoyances, etc.) and made our lives here worse, not better. We're as frustrated as some of you are.
Which is why Winds of Change.NET will be moving to Wordpress once some test migrations of other blogs are finished and confirmed to be trouble-free. Wordpress is inherently more CPU-friendly (PHP not Perl), has a wider variety of features & plug-ins, and a community that is way, way ahead in anti-spam measures. I'm hoping this can happen by mid-to late November. It would be a fine birthday present for me, and a present for many of you, too.
Wordpress is the way to go. We have been using Wordpress for over a year now with our own blog and have been very satisfied with the results, the plugins, and ease of use.
I think you will be really happy with WordPress.
Thanks for all your toil.
I switched from MT to Wordpress a little over a year ago and have been quite pleased with the results. However, even with the improvements in comment/trackback control it's no panacea. The real problem is irresponsible hosts e.g. Google/blogspot.
There's a larger issue, too. I think the evidence is growing that the blogosphere is too big for its britches. The various tools and measurement devices are getting increasingly unreliable. TTLB Ecosystem has been absurd since the last set of overhauls six months or so ago. Technorati is increasingly incredible. My total traffic to hits ratio is increasing at an enormous rate.
Looking forward to making the changeover. It'll be a nice change. I think I've got a pretty good handle on it, but if any of you Movable Type->WordPress switchers have any advice, please shoot me an email at evariste at (mydomain) or evariste at (thisdomain).
What Dave said.
And, yes, WordPress is the way to go for a variety of reasons. Still, I get quite a few spam trackbacks daily that I have to manually delete and quite a few real trackbacks wind up in my spam queue, requiring manual recover. The spammers are simply ahead of the filters.
Not to be too annoying, but if you've really permanently disabled trackbacks, why does every post still display a trackback URL?
I really don't know what does the trackball is udes for. Is this a kind of signature or what? Is it important or not?