Dullroar

Thanks for the feedback. Let me respond to a couple of points you've raised.

First, the document isn't designed to replace us updating and shipping better software. It's designed to provide information to our users who wanted to know more about the possible issues, the ways they could be addressed, and what's available *now*. I think it does an excellent job of that.

It may help to look at it from a different perspective. If you're the IT manager of a company that's using blogs to manage its intranet, and you might want to put one blog outside the firewall to update your company website, this would be all you ever needed to know. You don't care about what people are talking about in the blogosphere, you just want to know how to manage the tools you use. This is the right document for the job.

I think a vocal part of our audience doesn't understand the breadth of uses that MT is appropriate for. That being said, you're absolutely right that MT should ship out of the box with the right settings for most users, and I'm confident we'll get closer to that ideal in the future.

More to the point, if you've read the guide, you'll know that banning an IP isn't necessarily the best tactic, since IPs can be dynamic. I know exactly what's involved in the IP banning process, though, since I post to and admin about a dozen blogs.

Finally, we've never had TrackBacks on the movabletype.org site. It's not an attempt at squelching conversation, we just haven't had a chance to update the templates yet, though we'll fix that. We're actively soliciting TrackBack comments on the Professional Network weblog at http://www.sixpart.com/pronet/. I'd love to get more of your feedback, either there or via email.

Hope that answers some of your questions.

Anil, thanks very much for responding. I'm sure you're right that MT's breadth of users means the company's priorities are different from my own. All I know is that I feel stuck with MT. I have a lot of time invested in the platform so I don't want to leave, but I've been waiting for a workable, built-in comment-spam solution for about a year now.

Then I assume that you were happy to hear about my hiring as Product Manager of Movable Type? :-)

Jay - Yep, I was definitely happy to hear, especially because I like Blacklist a lot (hey, who doesn't?). So when will people be able to download a version of MT that comes with Blacklist built-in?

We're working on some good stuff but I can't really tell you what or when since both of those things would fall under the realm of talking about "future features" which is strictly against company policy. I hope you understand.

In any case, I'm sure you'll be delighted. :-)