Six Apart's European team is proud to announce the release of our international versions of Movable Type. Starting today, our popular Movable Type Publishing Platform will be available in French, Dutch, Spanish and German in addition to Japanese which has been available for some time. The translations cover the application setup, product documentation as well as a localized user interface and default weblog templates.

All paid licenses include dedicated support through our help ticket system in your local language and can be paid for in Euros! Check out the post on Professional Network for more details.

Enjoy!

We have just released Movable Type v3.14 which fixes the issue of extreme loads witnessed on servers under the strain of a massive spam attack. Because these attacks are increasing in both frequency and severity, we strongly recommend that all Movable Type users install this update. This is particularly important for any installation that is visible to the public on the web.

This release is a free update for Movable Type v3.x users and has been thoroughly tested both in-house, by our ProNet members and also by many of the web hosting companies initially affected by the problem. If you already purchased Movable Type or downloaded the free version, you’ll be able to download the new release from your Movable Type account.

The main changes in this new version are explained in detail below, but in summary, you can expect these updates:

• Unnecessary rebuilds upon comment moderation are eliminated.
• Generation of internal bookkeeping data for dynamic pages is not performed when using static pages.
• New weblogs default to having comment moderation enabled.

We have also attempted to use our response to this issue, both in communicating with our end users and with our partners who host web sites powered by Movable Type, to set a baseline of expectation for our future communications about vulnerabilities in our software.

Hi everyone, my name is Jay Allen and I am the Product Manager for Movable Type. I'm writing today to address—what else?—comment spam.

This is an issue that, as many of you know, I have spent several thousand waking hours working on since its first appearance back in the fall of 2003, both as the author of MT-Blacklist and as the maintainer of the Comment Spam Clearinghouse. This is an issue which Six Apart takes very seriously, as evidenced not only in the improvements in Movable Type v3.x but also, in some part, by my hiring to this position.

Over the last month, we have been devoting a great deal of resources to solving the comment spam problem once and for all and making it a non-issue, not just for us in the Movable Type/TypePad world, but also for all weblogs regardless of publishing tool. Our preference is towards solutions that scale to the entire weblog medium, not those which merely move the burden from one site to another, from one tool to another, or from spammers to users.

Identifying the Problem

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.