As I spent the last two hours unable to log into this site to write a blog post, I thought I would break with the usual pattern of looking for something interesting to write about and lay the blog problem out for the world to see.

Without naming names of any of the parties who are offering me advice and opinions, I am faced with what ought to be a fairly simple question:

Should I continue with Movable Type, or should I move to WordPress?

Sounds simple, right? Well, here's the problem. I have been on MT since 2003, and I want my archives to be fully accessible. I want everything to look the same way as it has always looked and for the older links to always link to their respective older posts.

I recently upgraded MT (to which I want to remain loyal), and that has not only not solved the endless spam problem, it has made it worse. The blog was so overwhelmed by spammers this morning that it shut down.

Here's what my hosting service (a really good one, to which I want to remain loyal) said:

"your site was going absolutely bananas. We wound up rebooting the thing because it wouldn't come under control."

And the explanation:

"It looks like spammers hammering away at your MT scripts. Unfortunately, given MT's lack of throttling or significant antispam implementation, the only thing we can do when they roll through is try to crush them - or, in this case, when the CGI processes have brought the server to its knees, reboot the thing. Just another day in the tech life."

I'm going bananas too, but I replied thusly:

"As I recently spent money on an MT upgrade, and I am considering spending a lot more on a facelift, this is bad news. My problem is that my links go back eight years now and I want them all to work (which does not seem to happen when blogs are converted to Wordpress). I wish I had been warned back in 2003 that MT would lead to problems like this, but I seem to be stuck with it, and it is apparently going to be expensive. It was very difficult even finding someone to work with me. Oh well. I'm just lucky to have a good hosting service!"

As I just said to Sarah in an email, this just plain sucks. I am not a geek, but a blogger. I only want to write posts, but everyone in the business seems to have one opinion or another, and I don't know who or what to believe anymore.

All I know is I hate change, especially when change creates problems. This is really no one's fault but the damned spammers. They keep getting better and better in their endless war of attrition and they are forcing my hand.

Seriously, the newer, more intelligent spam bots can and do actually leave comments which relate to the subject of the blog posts! Utterly maddening, and difficult to spot. I am seeing spammers lurking everywhere.

I suppose I could turn off comments, but I don't want to do that. I had thought that new comment filter which came with the upgrade was doing its job, because very few get through, but apparently that isn't the problem, so much as the fact that they are endlessly trying to get through, which eats up huge amounts of bandwidth and finally makes everything go bananas.

Does anyone who have an opinion on any of this? Because I am going bananas.

Seriously, I don't want to be doing this, because there's another war of attrition (you know, between the pro-socialist and the anti-socialist camps, which keeps getting mucked up by the culture war equivalent of spam) that I would rather not be fighting but feel obligated to fight. 

Nothing like being distracted from a war you don't want to fight by a war you don't want to fight. Sometimes I worry about my internal hard drive.

MORE: An additional explanation from my hosting service:

Unfortunately, MT hasn't seemed to have come up with anything that will help throttle against this sort of thing. The problem with CGIs is that they spawn new instances of themselves for every access. So, a spammer script that can generate a hundred requests in the span of two seconds can rapidly exhaust the memory and max out the CPUs at the same time.

If that is true, then MovableType just plain sucks.

And because I cannot move to WordPress without archive issues, I may be SOL.

And yes, there are archive issues, as I have seen them. There are countless bloggers I have linked over the years (many of whom I read and respect) who have moved to WP, and their old links no longer work. I want what I have written to remain.