My blog has never been “down” that I’m aware of and I have complete control over who comments, who visits, etc.

Squarespace has a free trial. My advice is to try it just to see how amazing a blog service can be. Even if you don’t switch because you’re “invested” in a service someplace else, you’ll at least know the level of quality that you should expect.

My guess is that if you tried it, you’d switch.

I will agree with you in one regard. MT was treated like a back burner development product but I was pleasantly surprised that 3.34 was such an improvement. I also expect that MT will improve faster than Wordpress this year. Furthermore your post simply isn’t fair to MT. They have built channels to gather feedback. You berate them for building the channels. You say this,”so 6A haven’t achieved their goal of making blogs failure-proof, why spend five paragraphs claiming they had?”

It’s all relative right? You can work to improve a product and still have room for improvement.

As far as your support claims, they are purely anecdotal and completely at odds with my own anecdotal experience. I have the support system at 6A responsive and effective. They have solved the problems with my installation MT quickly.

As far as the Spammer problem, are you suggesting that Wordpress has no such problems.

Here’s my take on the issue.
http://thalasar.com/archives/movable_type_vs.html

One more time for the Panglossian Anil: It’s The Spam, Stupid. We’re drowning, and you’re doing absolutely nothing about the problem.

Add to this a European representative whose response to my question about when if ever 6A was going to get around to working on *something* was to giggle around with his buddies and shout out loud across the room “Thanks for using the product” in the most sarcastic tone imaginable…

…before getting drunk and barging one of us across a room…

…and then (much later) hooking himself to a right-wing reactionary politician and forcing a conference-ful of people to listen to him drone at them…

We’re basically done with this crap. The outfit in question dropped MT like a hadful of dogshit some time ago, and I’ve successfully prevented at least a dozen multiblog license sales for 6A since. Treat your customers like crap and just *see* what we’ll do back to you.

Every tool has it’s day.

lol. I just find this statement funny. Thanks for the laugh. Back to drifting.

The truth is that both MT and WP (or any other PHP-based tool) will succumb to excess load at some point. The causes of that failure will be different, but they will fail just the same.

> I don’t want a system that fails under malicious attack, because malicious attacks are common, and if it fails under attack then interested readers don’t get to read. I would prefer a system that could cope with spam.

Understood, but just know any PHP tool wouldn’t cope with spam well either if they were installed and run as a CGI.

A few years back the Apache Web Server team decided to start bundling PHP with the core distribution. (I believe after MT was initially built, but I could be wrong here — the main point is PHP was NOT common 5+ years ago and CGI was.) That meant that not only was PHP spreading, but with a couple of quick configuration directives it was a built-in part of the server that was always running. The built-in nature of the PHP engine gave it peristence — its always running. No other programming language has the “defaults” advantage except for say ASP if you consider the Microsoft stack.

So any weblog tool written in Python, Ruby or any other cross platform scripting language no matter how well coded could be immune to a spam flood unless the adminstrator takes the added extra steps to make it scale and protect it.

In order to address this sort of thing, it has becoming common practice to use FastCGI. Other web servers (like Ruby fans favorite, Lighttpd) require PHP to be run with FastCGI in order to make web apps scale. I don’t think criticizing it’s use in MT as if it is some gross neglegence of Six Apart’s is completely unreasonable. I can understand criticisms that they weren’t fast and thorugh enough in their roll out of that support. That is true and they’ve heard that countless times from me that I don’t need to dwell on it. It’s here now and it works.

> I do expect a blogging platform to handle spam and to do the work for me, the same way as I expect Gmail to filter out the vast majority of spam email. Spam does not have any real impact on my experience of using Gmail because their filters are so good and they handle the spam gracefully. That’s the sort of user experience MT needs to provide.

I’d just like to point out that you are comparing a hosted service (GMail) with software that you host and install “yourself.” This is truly an apples and oranges comparison that indicates you don’t appreciate the issues in which you are speaking. Comparing TypePad and Gmail would be accurate and from what I understand TypePad’s comment spam handling is quite good. Both system put more resources and work into their spam protection then we could probably appreciate.

I suspect 6A’s fundamental puzzle with MT — how to combine static pages with the need to change those already published files without constant file regeneration — is unsolvable. So, yes, they allowed MT to languish while they were busy elsewhere. But, I don’t think they could have “fixed” MT in any case.