Upgrade to MT 3.0D

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I didn't plan to upgrade my Movable Type installation right now, but a spammer who's apparently in love with my site left about 160 comment-spams in a couple hours. The automatic IP ban throttle of MT 2.661 is a joke, I received a notification of ban after 80 comments! So I decided to test the new comments management features and voilà, upgrade plus comment deletion in less than 30 minutes.

One caveat though that I discovered during the process (I missed it during the alpha/beta test): the default encoding has been changed from iso-8859-1 to utf-8 and this is BAD for an upgrade. If your existing content contains non ASCII characters coded in iso-8859-1, you will need to change the PublishCharset preference as well as check that NoHTMLEntities has the right setting (for me it was commented out in 2.661, it's set to 1 in MT 3.0D). I'm glad I had a second user with a login name in ASCII, because I couldn't login after the upgrade with my regular login name because of the encoding! If your content is pure ASCII, you don't need to worry about this change.

I didn't change any template yet, If you experience anything funny with this weblog -- and I'm not refering to its content ;-) -- let me know.

Now is the time to think about which policy I'm going to adopt to keep this dumbass from spamming this site without annoying all legitimate commenters. I don't want to use TypeKey for various reasons (the first one being that I don't think it will deter spamming, the second one being that as a European citizen, I resent forcing visitors to leave their personal information on a central server hosted in a country that doesn't respect the European laws on privacy protection.) I'm also resisting closing comments after a certain time, since I've received interesting comments in the past on old entries, however it's probably the most efficient method and I might have to resort to it. A good method in MT 3 would be to enable moderation, but it requires a great reactivity on my side and, I fear, is rather aggressive in a world where people are used to instantaneity.

BTW, I set the comment throttle to 60 seconds, so if you plan to post two comments in a row, take some time to polish that second comment ;-).