Well, Movable Type 3.16 is out. Does anyone else out there get the same feeling now that we used to get every time good, old Microshaft released a hurried new bugfix for some terrible MSIE or Windoze flaw? I think the words from this blog characterize my feelings best:
Most bloggers are not going to notice any changes with this latest release. The focus for Movable Type 3.16 is on code quality and cleaning up what Six Apart calls little issues and bugs that have crept into the code base, either in the past year or, in some cases, since MT was first released.Damn right. First, the corporate empire of Six Apart forced everyone to upgrade to MT 3.x by encouraging plugin development for the newer platform and slowly, but surely, cutting off support for MT 2.x (I held off as long as MT-Blacklist kept functioning. All the while they formulated a new, draconian licensing policy which went against everything MT used to stand for.Don't know if I would call them "little issues and bugs." We've been pulling our hair out since the last release of MT which caused all types of problems [...]
Now, they're pushing out updates every chance they get, trying to stretch their credit with other so-called "grassroots" Internet groups and individuals, on the one hand, while peppering their press releases with corporatespeak gems like "A Solid, High-Quality Platform," "Blog Once, Run Everywhere" and "Better Reliability," on the other.
While all of this is by no means a surprise (cf. Red Hat Corporation), this is further indication of the deep, deep divide between the old-school companies like Microshaft that tell you like it is, steal with reckless abandon, throw out crazy projects and ideas but ultimately get things done, and the "grassroots" companies that rise from a concept to multi-million-dollar empires and ride on their former good name and publicity instead of user-friendliness and ubiquity.
I guess what I'm saying here is that, if Six Apart is vying to become another competition-crushing mega-corporation, it needs to learn a few tricks from Big Brother. I love Windoze and 90% of the world (except geeks and IT students) runs it. So here's to you, Six Apart, I finally love you. Get out there and show the world who's boss!
I guess it comes as no surprise that I'd disagree with a few points here, but if you don't mind, I thought I'd explain a bit.
First, we think it *sucks* that we were putting out lots of little bug fix updates. It forces people to go through all the trouble of upgrading without the benefit of new features. So we wrapped up all of them into one big release, and that's what 3.16 is. And I think the reason we called them "little fixes" is because, for most users, each of the fixes *is* little. But the cumulative effect is pretty big, and the ones that matter to each person are different.
I'm curious if you think we have a "former good name", or if you think we're not being user-friendly these days. I'm especially curious how our current licensing is draconian, or what tenets of the MT philosophy you think we've contradicted. And, to be fair, encouraging people to develop plugins for MT3 is *hardly* the same as forcing everyone to upgrade. In fact, it's the opposite: we're trying to give you good, solid reasons that you'd want to upgrade.
We're not interested in being big brother, we just want to make sure that one of the companies that brings blogging to a broad audience is actually *made up of bloggers*. I'm pretty sure we're the only big company in the blogging space for which that's true.
Anyway, thanks for taking the time to give us your feedback, and I hope I've addressed some of your points.
Anil, thanks for writing. In all fairness, MT 3.16 is a big improvement over MT 2.x, but I don't know if the way Six Apart got MT there, and, more importantly, where MT is going, is appropriate.
a) Slowly, but surely the proportions of "How do I fix this MT 2.x problem" questions to "Just upgrade to 3.x" answers rose to 1:1; I can't blame SA, the world moves on, but even Microsoft provides, what, a three-year life-cycle thing with the possibility of extended support?
Therein lies the problem. Having commercialized MT, SA has all the more leverage to say it owes no support to non-paying users, and, although it is quite possible to beg, haggle and squeeze a few questions out of the Support forum bigwigs, the prevailing feeling of people who were in the same position as I that there came a very distinct division between paying and non-paying MT users.
Perhaps with good intentions, SA has slowly created a layer of vagueness between MT and slow adopters; the freedom to choose is perceived by some (I am amongst such persons) as a catch, or, at the very least, a looming possibility for a "CYA"-type future catches.
b) As a result, this ties into the licensing problem. You might say that there is no problem, that we should all go by the honour system, but the fact remains: the moment SA says "no more than X blogs and Y authors" the possibility appears that they might i) cripple the free version in the future to enforce their interests or ii) have more leverage in denying support and/or otherwise "encouraging" users to switch to 3.x. Can you promise me that that won't happen? Of course not. Who knows, if I were in Ben and Mena's position, I might have to do that as well, eventually. There is nothing easier than making a key MT component work only with a component provided from SA servers or issuing precompiled executables, etc.
When I first started using MT back in 2001 (if memory serves right), MT as it was, with the forum, was a godsend; people would freely share solutions, support was both conditional on goodwill and indefinite and payment was for prominent "Featured Blog" or "Updated Blog" position.
Despite what you may believe, there is a second layer of MT users out there now, those who came to fear and loathe MT for the directions it's taking, partly because of past experience with merger & acquisition movers and shakers: first acquire or create new services, i.e. LiveJournal, TypePad, then slowly wring the users into a binary "pay or you can't play" scheme, by making the move to a new publishing platform expensive or unfeasible (I have enough trouble with three blogs and about 4 years' worth of accumulated materials); imagine a journalistic office with 30 blogs. Hey, people still running WinNT 4.1, you get the idea.
c) So, no, I don't think you are being user-friendly these days; this problem for me is mostly with MT itself, not LJ or TP. Maybe I'm between market niches here, but MT is surrounded by a lot of zealots, those building plug-ins, those writing praise to MT on a daily basis. There's just no suggesting anything, or so it feels. Avoids corporatespeak (read the initial MT press releases), make the Limited version seem less "limited," put the free download prominently on the front page, and add the support forum to there as well; eliminate mandatory TypePad logins for downloading free versions and put less emphasis on license agreements and logins and more on looking like you're not going to go the way of Red Hat and become another faceless giant. Let me give you a short object lesson in friendliness: Apache, Red Hat. One is uncomplicated, straightforward, honest, the other one is simply corporate.
d) MT 3.x is far from perfect, but on the support forums, one often fears to complain about bugs that's been in there for a while, because the form reply "You don't really pay for this, so take what you get"; I don't know how the moderator selection on the forum works, but I think, at least in tone, each poster should be treated like a paying customer.
e) I spent all last night upgrading MT 3.15 to 3.16 (I had a lot of custom modifications in many of the scripts), only to find out that it made zero difference to me functionally. I really think that anything that is not critical should be provided as an option but released less frequently, both to not freak people out, à la Microsoft's patch-a-day circus, and also to let people upgrade on a regular basis, not all of a sudden.
f) Finally, I might have this wrong, but does not the developer of MT-Blacklist work for MT now? When I was on MT 2.661 and Mt-Blacklist essentially stopped working, thereby forcing me to upgrade to stem the flood of comment and trackback spam, I couldn't help but wonder why support for the old MT-Blacklist was discontinued but the one for MT 3.x flourished.
That's all it is; simplicity, all cards on the table and less company lingo. You make great software, but I really have a problem with your rapport with your customers. The question is: will what I said here make a difference? Thanks for listening.
MT-Blacklist stopped working? I'm still using MT 2.661 (and considering upgrading which is how I found this post) and MT-Blacklist 1.65 and it works great! I just install MT-Blacklist in February '05. http://garylapointe.com/mypointe/pointes/001024.php
I was under the impression there were still some issues with MT-Blacklist 2.x in the MT 3.x or 3.1x versions so I've been hesitant to migrate.
In MT I'm missing sub-categories and I was hoping some of the dynamic information might help speed up my rebuilds. I've been getting slow responses when posting comments. I thought with TypeKey and comment moderation at a minimum I could turn it off MT-blacklsit on comments and just use it for trackbacks (assuming that's one of the things slowing it down).
Yes, it did. Trying to figure out why, I came to the conclusion that the MT-Blacklist for MT 2.661 just crapped out after I would ask it to despam over 900 comments. I don't know how many comments your site has, but mine has over twelve hundred now, some of them quite long. I think MT-Blacklist had a problem with that, especially since I was getting a lot of spam at the time and my blacklist was a thousand items longer than the master blacklist on Jay Allen's site.
I couldn't register on the MT-Blacklist forums, since it repeatedly refused to e-mail me my confirmation e-mail, so I was forced to upgrade to MT 3.x, where the new MT-Blacklist had neither problems with my long blacklist, nor with my growing amount of comments.
I think the bugginess is a total misconception; also, after installing these additional plugins (now conveniently rolled up into one), I got exactly zero spam messages. This streak was broken a few days ago when I got a single spam message. While I'm against the politics of the new MT 3.x, its comment and trackback systems rule and the MT-Blacklist for it is impeccable.
Well, sub-categories are kind of pointless for me, but dynamic rebuilding has been attracting me for a while (I see you are also getting into the thousands of entries now), but I wish I had the time to sit down and figure it out. Comment slow-down, eh? I really can't complain about this in MT 3.x.
Well, your mileage may vary on this, but there it is. Tell me, how did you get that captcha thing (number-based comment validation) to work with MT-Blacklist? I've been a bit unsuccessful (or perhaps impatient) in trying to do that. More importantly, does it actually help stop spam?
I had the captcha (scode plugin) going before ages ago (way before I installed MT-Trackback). I never had many spam problems, I don't know if it was my blog being not so popular or what). It picked up a bit before I installed MT-Trackback but never more than a dozen (which made me assume they were done by hand and not bypassing the captcha). The scode plug-ing does make you modify a few MT source files, but it's explained quite well in the docs.
I don't recall having to do much to get it to work with MT-Blacklist 1.65 if there was anything special to do I just followed the instructions and it worked.
I think I've change the comment and ping script names twice now and that doesn't seem to help much, but I thought it might just stop some crawling tools.
I do think I get more (trackback) spam since I installed MT-Black list. I'm not sure if I got more popular or there are scripts out there that seek out sites that use it...
Weird. I did get a lot of trackback spam, but definitely not as much as the hundreds of spam comments I used to get. I find that renaming scripts changes nothing; if your site links to the script-page at one point, it will be found. Captchas are also a pain in the ass. Actually, ever since I installed those tools I linked to above, I've had pretty much no spam at all. We'll have to see where all of this goes.