Doesn't that rel trick make comment links much less useful, as the search engines stop going through valid comments?

I prefer blocking spammers at the router/server level, firewalling off their IPs and recognizing their http payload, but you don't go to fight spammers with the anti-spam tools you want, you fight spammers with the anti-spam tools you get ;) Calc's too busy to set up anything complex, methinks.

As for funding, maybe we can get President Bush to give us some $x0,000 under the table to talk about his policies in our blog. Oh, we'll talk about his policies all right. Bwahahahaha...

Oh, shit, you made that joke. I claim "it's 4 in the fucking morning".. I'll get back to you after I've slept a bit.

I would highly recommend moving away from Movable Type. Not just because of the cost but because of their license... it's not a very friendly license and is far from "free" or "open source". So much so that it's difficult to hack their code to do neat things. The tool I use, b2evo, is badass and will be even more badass when they release the next version (0.9.0.11). The spam-handling tools are incomparable and the license is GPL.

You might want to try blog ads (google)... or raising the money via a PayPal or Amazon-like fundraiser.

Tang: Well, yeah, but there's less in the way of links in valid commenters than there is in the spam comments. And I wish I'd managed to grab the binaries to 2.661 before Six Apart went to 3, because I feel that we're slowly being locked into an upgrade path that I wouldn't take, if I had the choice. (Well, it would be a lot easier if it was free, anyway.) Keep thinking, though. There's got to be a solution somewhere.

Joe: Well, if it were just me, I'd be fiddling with b2evo or wordpress or one of those other tools. When I wanted to start blogging, though, MT was it, and it wasn't bad back in its 2.6 days (well, other than BerkeleyDB corrupting on you, but I've got MySQL on the backend here, which seems to be more solid.)

But I've got other bloggers to think of, and the time invested in coding the HTML to MT's templates, and getting a couple of the folks to login on the b2evo test install I did was like pulling teeth. So it's easiest if I pander to their tendencies, and that unfortunately means upgrading MT. Which leads me right back into my dilemma.

It's not that I *like* 6A, after the original licensing fiasco with 3 (in which it would have cost $500 to upgrade the blog as opposed to just $100), but the options are kinda limited.

Yeah, blogads and/or google seem to be the way to go, but we'll see how it shakes out with others.

-kat

It doesn't really matter to me what software we use, as long as it works and we can hack something up to migrate our old posts over, and there are decent anti-spam measures. Also, I like trackbacks.

Looking over b2e's feature list... looks nice. If it's too much trouble to set up, though, then that's that.

I won't mind seeing blogads, but for the circa 20 users we get a day who aren't referrer spam bots, I don't think it would bring in much.

Well, there are several of us. $100 for a one-time thing, split several ways, does begin to approach pocket change. I could pitch in to the hat on that.

As for ongoing hosting and bandwidth costs, if those mount to the point that some income stream would be a good offset to Cal's outlays for the site I'd certainly have no objection to ads.

Do you need to upgrade, or could you do without the new anti-spam measures incorporated into the new MT? How bad are things right now?

$20 each really should be pocket change. That's under $2/month for a year, put away, to save. That's $0.50/week. That means, if every weekday you can find 2 aluminum pop cans, worth $0.05 each, you're done. That is, unless you're in such dire straits that you're already doing that, and need that every penny.

Of course, it would also take a year to raise the money, or to afford to pay it back.

Would it be worth $20 each, to you? You spend hours on the site itself, and I know you can't just "find" two hours worth of work somewhere, but that's all it amounts to. That's not much compared to how much time each of you you spend writing to make the site better.

Funding drive is also an option, at least to chip away at the full amount.

Would I flee from daily readership if you added blogads? If I watched TV, would I stop if they added 1 more minute of comercials? No, probably not. But I would notice, and it would annoy me. I don't know if anyone would actually say "That's it, they have ads now, I'm moving on." But it would harm the experience. It's refreshing to go to a site without ads nowadays.

I think, for the amount of annoyance, you'd not going to get paid enough to use ads. Your readership isn't high enough. Maybe if it was in the hundreds, certainly if it was in the thousands.

Wouldn't be a deal-breaker either way though.

Tang: I have a b2evo testbed set up that I did a while back. None of the Zoners who hang in #spork on a regular basis seemed to really want to fiddle with the testbed, though, which is why I'm fairly convinced that switching isn't exactly the answer. Although, I'd be prepeared to reopen the discussion if the Zoners thought they might be willing to do the transition. Of course, we'd have to figure out stuff like carrying 4M's site design over, and figuring out how or even if posts can be transferred.

Will: I may take you up on that. I think I'm going to call an all-hands NFZ meeting when I get a chance to discuss this with the regular writing staff. The trick is, finding a time when all seven of us can make it.

Matt: Welcome to the NFZ. I don't think I've seen a comment from you before, hence my welcome. Yeah. I see your point on ads, which is why I've always been half and half on them. The spam's gone down ever since I've renamed the comment script away from its mt-default name, but I guess there is no perfect solution.

Maybe it'll wait until next fall when I might be in the workforce. Hmmm. Thanks for your commentary.

-kat