Comments Problems

i have been frustrated with the comments being down, too. For some reason, the whole of Munuviana has been hit hard recently. Pixy is on it, as he always is, but as you know he's only one man. Superhuman yes, but still only one man. Here's some interesting facts that might shed light on things or at least help us all to be patient:

We got 1.3 million trackbacks over the past 30 days, and 550,000 comments. About 99.8% of trackbacks and over 90% of comments were spam. Over 99% of the spam got blocked, but that still left a lot of cleaning up.

. . .

Massive amounts of comment spam coming in right now - several thousand a minute. Busy upgrading Fluffy's armament. Back soon.

Ugh. Seriously ugh. We're talking over a hundred comments a second here.

Update: New super doom-Fluffy installed. We'll see how we go with that.

Update update: 75,000 80,000 85,000 spams from a single source in under 90 minutes. It would have been more than that except that the server ground to a halt under the load. It's sped up significantly now that it's all being blocked immediately.

Update update update: Out of 90,000 95,000 spams, four actually got through. Congrats to Ted, Linda, Daniel and Lawren, who won the prize.

Update^4: 100,000! It's now 104 minutes since the flood started

Update^5: Looks like it's leveled off at a steady 1500 spams a minute. I wonder how long they'll keep up this futile exercise?

Update^6: Just past the two hour mark and it seems to have stopped. 123,111 spam attempts, four of which got through, for a success rate of 0.00324%. I shall now delete those four spams... And done.

. . .

We have to move off Movable Type; we have no choice in the matter. However, no-one will be forced off MT before they're ready. The new servers will be able to cope with the existing users just fine; the problem is that further growth will bring serious problems. We're already the largest MT installation in the world, and worse, we are stuck on version 2.6 due to licensing issues.