The BBC has upgraded its blogging software to be better able to handle the thousands of comments it receives on its array of official blogs, as BBC News blogs editor Giles Wilson explains:

It’s often been frustrating to leave comments (and also frustrating to publish them) because of slow response times. Part of the problem was that we were asking too much of our software. So we thank those of you who have had patience with us and haven’t given up. We fully expect the new software upgrade to have addressed our problems.

The improvements were long overdue, with the BBC system creaking under the weight of traffic and comments to its blogs. At times, its blog database server was running at 100% capacity. Much of the cause for this was spam, with the BBC getting dozens of spam comments a minute.

As part of the upgrade, the BBC is also introducing registration, which it hopes will help to tackle the spam problem. Anyone who wants to leave a comment will have to register first and Wilson recognises this might upset some:

No doubt some people will feel cheated that they now have to register to leave a comment. Sorry if you feel like that. But we’ve thought long and hard about the best thing to do, and believe that this is likely to be the most effective and efficient way of publishing as many comments as possible.

Many other news outlets require registration, so the BBC is not alone in taking this route. But as one of the comments on the BBC Editors blog points out:

I guess the concept of Akismet was too novel and new for the BBC to have discovered for the spam handling.

Akismet, which I use on this blog to filter comments, is remarkably effective at keeping spam at bay. Using such a system at the BBC would be a first step towards tackling the flood of spam.

UPDATE: More on the upgrade on the BBC Internet blog, explaining that “the migration of over 12,000 blog posts, nearly a million comments and hundreds of different templates has gone reasonably smoothly.”

The upgrade involved migrating from Movable Type 3.2 to its newer version, MT 4.1. Movable Type was chosen “after extensive tests and evaluation in partnership with the team at Headshift, who we have worked with closely on this project.”