The short version: comments are back on, though I haven’t finished all the planned upgrades; and TypeKey registration is now required to comment on this blog.

About TypeKey: it’s free and relatively painless, so hopefully it will not be too onerous for you. It’s also something that I’ve been planning to do for a while as a spam-prevention measure, and in fact tried to do two years ago, but Movable Type threw errors at the time due to the nature of my install (see previous entries: 1, 2, 3). Those errors have since been fixed, and I have now successfully implemented TypeKey. This definitely acts against comment spam, but I suspect it will also reduce the comment script’s impact on the server.

Adding TypeKey is one of several things I’ve planned to do to improve this Movable Type install’s performance so that, among other things, it doesn’t take you a minute or more to submit a comment. So far, I’ve also eliminated some index templates on a couple of blogs that were pretty resource intensive. Next up is to upgrade to version 3.34, which I thought I’d be able to do this weekend, but my install is affected by a couple of the upgrade issues mentioned here, so that will take a bit more time and care. Once I’ve upgraded, I’ll see if I can run it under FastCGI, which should really make it cook.

But my guess is that things should be a bit better already.

Also: for a few days last week my contact form was apparently returning error messages on submission. This was a result of my hosting provider changing the security settings on their formmail script, and has since been fixed.