Upgrade to MT 3.16

My upgrade to MT 3.16 was reasonably smooth, but there were a couple of annoyances, which relate back to the upgrade instructions and documentation. It has some nice improvements in the interface – for instance a more clear listing of categories and subcategories in the category selector field box in author post screens.

The main nuisance for me was getting the control panel for new version of the nofollow plugin – a default part of the upgrade – to work. I noticed that other users were reporting more serious issues in the forums. The installation was fine for me on my hosted server except for the problem with the nofollow plugin.
I had the old (January 2005) version of nofollow. It is a good idea to remove the 2 files installed by the old installation or at least the old nofollow file in the plugins directory. The old installation also created a file in the mt/php/plugins subdirectory but the upgrade should overwrite it. There is a note about this on the release page but it ought to be highlighted. The other thing – which is buried in a text note in a file loaded during the upgrade – is to change permissions on the nofollow.cgi file in the mt/plugins/nofollow/ directory to 755.
The upgrade has not allowed for priorizing of (anti-spam) plugins. If MT Blacklist is turned on, it processes comments and pings first.
I have tried running with MT Blacklist off, but with the SpamLookup and MT-Keystrokes plugins enabled and those two handle all the spam nicely. If I turn on MT Blacklist, it seems to handle all the spam. I have set some aggressive strings to block references to some common gambling terms, some pharmaceuticals and a few nude celebrities. Either way, I have to check and clear logs but I seem to have reached a point where I am not having to despam very much.