Now a week into using Movable Type 3.1, my biggest observation about changed behavior isn’t with MT itself, it’s with MT-Blacklist. The newest version — the one distributed with the Plugin Pack and the only version compatible with MT 3 — no longer has an option to scan your site for blacklist matches, an omission which makes it a good deal harder to clean up after comment spammers.

The old MT-Blacklist would let you search your site for comments that matched your blacklist, and present them all to you so that you could delete them and rebuild the relevant pages. That workflow made sense; frequently, you would get 50 new comments from the same spammer, and in order to get rid of all of them, you’d only have to let MT-Blacklist process one, loading the relevant strings, finding the other 49 comments which matched, and deleting the whole lot of them. That functionality is gone — the new MT-Blacklist handles checking individual messages great, but has no function that lets you check the site for any new blacklist entries and handle matches in bulk.

Maybe I’m missing something; the docs aren’t done for the new version yet, so it’s very possible that I’ve just overlooked the golden link that will do what I need. Alas, if I’ve overlooked it, it’s not for a lack of searching, and at this point I’m dealing with spam one-by-one, and growling the whole time. And in looking through the MT support forums, it appears I’m not the only one!