Movable Type Publishing Platform: Comment spam load issue:
Recently, however, there have been a number of reports about the escalating effect of comment spam on Movable Type installations, especially evident in shared hosting environments. At first, we assumed that these problems were caused mainly on legacy systems (i.e. MT 2.x) running without the benefit of the modern anti-spam measures (e.g. TypeKey, comment moderation, MT-Blacklist v2.x, etc.) built to protect Movable Type installations. After further analysis and load testing, we’ve actually found that this is not the case.
In fact, we have found that there is a fairly major bug (in terms of effect, but not code size) which causes page rebuilding even in the case of a comment submission which would be moderated and hence should have no effect on the live page. This means that even if you are using comment moderation in Movable Type and even force moderation in MT-Blacklist, your server load is impacted just as if a comment had been posted to the live site. This bug has been fixed in development.
Well, yeah, that would be bad: the software goes through the motions of posting a comment that has already been blocked with all the resulting load of page rebuilding. That would be bad.
Right now, I’m kinda happy I can just rename the parts of my site that generate comments and the site still works (woo hoo!) and spambots are a thing of the past . . . . when the collective brain trust at 6Apart can make that work, then we’re onto something.