Normally I’m not one to get frustrated with MovableType (my blogging software) but today I’m a little upset that it’s not doing what I would like it to. I decided to retro-fit some new categories to my blog and stumbled upon the complete absence of a batch editor of any value at all. The current batch editor only allows changing of a single category and not assignment of multiple categories so you have to go through each entry in turn – painful! They allowed batch editing of tags but not categories, I wonder why? Suggestion to MT to write/include this feature.
Anyway finished off what I wanted to, thankfully not too many entries affected by the changes. I’ve also turned off trackbacks again after a valiant effort of trying to keep the social loop open after the last shutdown. However, in recent times I have been getting trackback spam again, and in quantities. Being rather susceptible to patterns I started to notice that every single day I would get 50 spam messages. A single batch, right? Well not exactly: If I cleared out my spam folder at say 2330 it would have exactly 50 at 0900 the next day, the same would be true no matter what time of day I emptied the spam folder. Now the spam folder is not published so I couldn’t be suffering from a spider checking for 50 entries by bad spammer man. Puzzling. Some days I would not check the folder until 1400 the next day and still only 50, no more no less. I don’t really believe in coincidences so it got me thinking that maybe there was some sort of back door that wasn’t being fully abused by the spammers. Either way I’ve decided to disable all future trackbacks if for no other reason than to preserve my sanity. 🙂