As I mentioned in my previous post, I upgraded Captain's Quarters underlying program, Movable Type, from its original version (2.661) to the new 3.0 version. Most of the changes will be transparent to you, thanks to the outstanding programming of CQ's designer, Mel from Moxie Design Studios.

Unlike 2.661, 3.0 actually costs money, although I got a discount thanks to a donation I had made earlier to MT. So why do it? The main reason is that the author interface is more elegant, and especially that the folks at MT improved the Java scripts to work within Mozilla. Until now, I've used IE to do most of my authoring, and while I have no particular problem with Microsoft -- I love their Office applications -- the security holes in IE and their mail clients drive me batty.

The other reason, and the one that affects you the most, is that CQ has been bombarded by comment spam lately, and the new MT program does a much better job of blocking it. I had been using MT-Blacklist, a terrific program that sets up a defense against comment spam, but I'd rather use something a bit more robust. MT 3.0 requires comment approval or prior registration before posting. You can preregister for all MT blogs at Typekey, a free service from MT. Once you register and log in, any comments you make on CQ or other MT 3.0 blogs will automatically post. It's painless and MT promises not to spam you in return, and it will allow me to focus on blogging rather than continually updating my Blacklist files to combat the bastards who keep clogging up my comments. Seriously -- it has been a huge problem in both my time and bandwidth.

Let me know if you experience any problems, and I will try to get comments approved as quickly as I can for those who have not yet registered with Typekey. I hope you continue to enjoy Captain's Quarters!

UPDATE: Right now, it appears that the Typekey interface isn't working as planned. Any comments entered are being held, but you're not seeing the notification of that, and so far I can't preapprove anyone. As soon as that's fixed, I will be going through all of my regular commenters to approve you ahead of time. (Yes, Miles, Adaplant, and Arne, you'll be approved -- I swear it's not a vast right-wing conspiracy!)

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