Category Archives: Discourse.net

Six Apart released a patch to MT 2.661 and 3.x that fixes a hole which would allow evildoers to send email to third parties. Unfortunately, the patch is not promised to be compatible with lower versions, such as 2.64 which is what I'm running. I purposefully didn't upgrade to 2.66x because I didn't like some of the new improved features. And I didn't go to 3.x because some of my favorite plugins won't work there and it would require some redesign of the site, which would take time.

But it's increasingly clear that I'm reaching the end of the line. Sooner or later I have to either go to 3.x, which is hard, or to WordPress, which will be a very very hard conversion, especially for the archived posts.

I have other things to do.

Meanwhile, I've loaded up the patch despite the lack of warranty. Please drop me a note if something seems weirder than usual.

In my third (wow!) Koufax nomination, Discourse.net is nominated for The Koufax Awards: Best Series for my item on the Bybee Torture Memo.

This isn't like my other nominations, where although I'm delighted to be in their company, I think other people so clearly deserve to win that it would be a travesty to vote for me. I could cope with this one.

So, please, if you liked the series, go vote — once.

Oddly, even though the nomination is for a series, it doesn't mention the several related items I wrote, including:

• Apologia Pro Tormento: Analyzing the First 56 Pages of the Walker Working Group Report (aka the Torture Memo) which may have been the best of the bunch.
• Deconstruction of Torture Memo's Analysis of Criminal Intent
• Why The Bybee Memo Reads Like a One-Sided Brief: It Was (for the CIA)
• Experts Agree! OLC Botched Work on Torture!
• Were the Torture Memos Just Normal Lawyering?
• Torture Memo Enthusiastically Approved at Highest Levels; CIA Getting Cold Feet
• Administration: Torture Memos Inoperative
• Torture: Wrong Yesterday, Wrong Today, Wrong Tomorrow
• Another How-To-Torture Memo
• Yoo, Unrepentant
• Bush Ordered “Humane” Treatment in Feb. 2002. Then What?

Update: The nice people at Wampum have included the whole list now.

Some very kind person or persons has nominated discourse.net for Wampum's Koufax Awards in two categories: Best Expert and Best Single Issue Blog.

While I'm really pleased to be nominated, I don't actually think I deserve to win as Best Expert (and regardless of desert, have no chance to win). I'm going to vote for Brad DeLong.

And I absolutely reject the suggestion that this is a single-issue blog. And by the way, torture is evil.

Many ISPs, including mine, are having major problems with comment spam straining their servers. I can report that two simple fixes have blocked a HUGE fraction of my MT 2.6x comment spam: closed comments on all posts more than a month old, using the close comments plugin, and I rewrote my comment templates to require users to preview comments once before posting. Combined with my usual MT-Blackllist list, the results are dramatic. Not 100% blockage, but at least 97% of the stuff that used to get through isn't. And much of what remains is weird spam — links to non-existent web sites … which I presume are being groomed for sale once they get high googleranks. (And lots of these are in the .de TLD for some odd reason.)

As an experiment, I will be closing down comments on all posts that haven't had any comments for a few weeks. The idea is to shrink the target for comment spammers — I had hundreds of comment spams over the weekend despite MT-Blacklist and I'm getting more than a little fed up swatting it all.

In the last three weeks the blog has been under escalating attack by comment spammers. I'm killing it as fast as I can, but it's taking its toll. Meanwhile, because the blog is so large, the rebuilds are timing out routinely. I've employed a number of tricks to deal with this, but they take time too, and at some point they will stop working. It's starting to feel like it's time to update or to change software or close comments (which I would hate to do).

MT 3.1x has problems with legacy plugins. At least five of the non-essential but cute ones I use won't work with it. I have also read that some users have trouble with the MT-Blacklist function in 3.1. That would just make comment spam matters worse.

So I could go to WordPress, where I suppose I belong, but the conversion seems far from trivial. I want links to the blog to keep working, for one thing.

The problem is that between work and our massive home remodeling project hitting a critical period I don't really have infinite time to devote to this.

Advice welcome.

(Incidentally, I could be off line much of today, as I'll be in Tallahassee for a 2-day meeting of the Florida Supreme Court's committee on privacy and court records. In all probability you will see the spam mount up, unless I can get into Tallahassee's digital canopy.)