The can what is filled with worms

I’ve been running an old version of Movable Type for a while now, and that’s because I’ve got a bunch of custom code from the old archive depending on it.

I’ve been lazy to upgrade, and the brouhaha over the revised licensing of version 3.0 made me wonder whether it was worth the effort. As a result, this site hasn’t really employed some of the basic requirements of a weblog — comments, specifically.

Well, I upgraded to Movable Type 3.33 back on Tuesday, and today, I’ve enabled the commenting system.

To be the truthful, I’m not totally sold on the idea of comments. I love leaving comments on my friends’ sites, and I love reading comments on community sites such as Metafilter. But I haven’t had the greatest experience enabling comments on this site.

Back in the late ’90s, when teen pop ruled the world, I actually wrote about a boy band named the Lyte Funky Ones, or LFO (not to be confused with the electronica group of the same name.) I had a very rudimentary guestbook-style system in place — way before systems such as MT were a glimmer in their developers’ eyes — and I was inundated with teenagers confessing their dying love for the group on that specific entry.

Thing is, none of my commenters actually read the piece. It was a pretty scathing review, and the teenyboppers didn’t bother to address it.

Another time, I gave a nice review of Radiohead’s Kid A. Some guy stopped by to say I was an idiot for liking the album. And he was a Radiohead fanboy — you know, one of the "true" fans.

Well, commenting systems have gotten a bit more sophisticated to deal with spamming and to support moderation. So if I feel like trampling all over the spirit of an open and robust exchange of ideas, I can do so! But I vow not to let my superiority complex interfere. Too much.

For now, I venture (cautiously) into the 21st Century. No one can accuse me of being an early adopter.