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.