Normally upgrades to our technical infrastructure aren’t news, but there are a couple of changes in Movable Type 3.2 that are worth noting because things are a bit in flux around here. The background to the upgrade was simple: as some of you have observed, Movable Type was getting increasingly cranky and prone to HTTP 500 errors, although in its defense the outage this week was not its fault. So in part to address that, and in part because Six Apart warned us that support for our former platform 3.15 would be limited, I took a couple of hours out yesterday to make the move to 3.2.
The steps, which included backing up our existing MT MySQL database, backing up the actual application files, then overlaying the production server with the new 3.2 files. Everything went off more or less trouble free. The only gotchas were a stall when the upgrade scripts tried to revamp our MT:Log table, which as it turned out had 1.3 million events in it (we get a lot of spam – truncation was my friend here), and the XMLRPC support broke (Cote found the answer for that here). Otherwise, the upgrade went pretty smoothly.
But there is one important change that you guys need to be aware of: our previous spam filter, MT-Blacklist, is not out of the box compatible with 3.2, which includes an integrated spam filtering system that we’d used in an earlier iteration for trackback spam. The new built in spam system has some advantages over MT-Blacklist, but some disadvantages as well. For one, it doesn’t have access to the keyword filtering list MT-Blacklist built up over time; I’ve pulled some of the information from MySQL and pasted it in manually, but it’s not ideal.
Anyhow, the important point to note for all of you is that the next couple of days should see a slight increase in the number of fraudulent comments that beat our newly hatched filters, but we’ll be actively managing it and hope it’s not too much of an inconvenience. On the plus side, trackbacks have a much better chance of getting through then previously.
If you have any problems or questions relating to the upgrade, just let me know. Thanks for your patience.
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