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.”
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Akismet isn’t free for businesses. I don’t know what the price is, but it’s possible the BBC would balk at paying.
Thanks for the comment, Bryan. I don’t think it would be a cost issue. The BBC has been running its blogs on Movable Type and there is a Akismet plugin available.
I would have thought by far the most important consideration with Akismet is that the BBC would not be happy sending every comment they receive off to a third party for verification when it would include personal details like email address. The British press would have had a field day with that as a DPA issue I’m sure.
Hi Alf
Martin’s point was something we considered, as well as the cost. But given the benefits of registration (user profiles, better integration with other BBC services, easier migration as we launch new(er) services) and given that for a substantial part of our user base then leaving comments, posts, tweets on their own personal spaces is more of an option that using bbc.co.uk (like this blog post) then registration was a strong(er) option. The installation for our previous platform was also 2 years old. We’ve learnt a few lessons to increase performance with this new upgrade which should also lessen spam.
Whilst I’m here then thanks for your fascinating paper. Lets talk sometime.