I noticed that posting comments was taking 15 to 20 seconds. I typed “movabletype comment posting delay” in Google and found this article with these instructions about an anti-spam service, blitzed.org, that has gone out of business. The comment posting routine was trying to contact the defunct service and check to see if the poster was coming from a “blacklisted” spam source. It would give up after 15 to 20 seconds.

Fix instructions:

1. Login to Movable Type. (Your account will need to have System Administrator privileges.)

2. Click on the “Plugins” link in the main navigation on the left hand side.

3. Look for the “SpamLookup – Lookups” plugin set listed among your other plugins.

4. Click “Show Settings.”

5. Under “IP Blacklist Services” highlight and replace the text “opm.blitzed.org” with “zen.spamhaus.org”.

6. Click “Save Settings.”

Comment posting much quicker now! I think this formal kind of support is an advantage of using MovableType

Lowdown is a MovableType plugin that simplifies text, converting “high characters” like curly quotes to low characters and also strips out html. I’ve been trying to get the html to not show in the recent comments section on the main page. The MTGlobalComments plugin I use does not properly process the remove_html=”0″ setting. But now I can use a lowdown=”0″ setting and all html is stripped out.

Not only does it strip out the html, but now the right side of mac5 will not get broken in IE when a truncated link tag is displayed… because now it doesn’t display.

The MovableType system has been upgraded to version 3.14. Things will look different when you log in. Most of the changes were “under the hood” improvements that make the system perform better and more secure. Two features I’ll be exploring right away are sub-categories (you can double categorize posts) and scheduling (you can have something post in the future.)

Read more here: www.movabletype.org/docs/mt30.html.

And here: www.movabletype.org/docs/mt31.html.