The .Text software on blogs.msdn.com has been updated to fight blog comment spam — David Weller has posted an excellent description of the new features. However, as commenters to his blog have pointed out, some of the features could be seen as overkill. In particular, all posts older than 30 days have now had their comments disabled; Betsy Akoi described this as reducing the "attack surface" of the MSDN blogs. Unfortunately, it also stifles some interesting discussions and back-and-forth resulting from people finding old posts of mine via search engines.

The only way to work on a laptop: folder redirection and offline files is a good example, particularly because I just found out that one of my drinking buddies wrote the internal FAQ about client-side caching. I was going to use his FAQ to answer some of the comments to that post, but now I'm going to have to create a whole new post just so that readers can add new comments — and I'll have to do this every 30 days! At least until they let us turn this off on a per-blog basis — or my buddy gets so enraged about me "stealing his work" that he sets up his own blog :-)

Update: with the move to Community Server, we now have control over individual posts. And I've turned off anonymous comments on this post precisely because it was attracting comment spam!