If you have a TypePad blog, here’s some good news on what Six Apart is planning to implement as part of major improvements in everyone’s efforts to combat comment and trackback spam.
An announcement yesterday on the Everything TypePad support site includes this news about enhancements Six Apart is working on:
- First, we’ll provide support for TypeKey-based comment authentication. TypeKey is a service that lets you confidently identify a particular commenter, and it is a free service. We’ve supported TypeKey comment authentication in Movable Type for more than a year now, and customers who have implemented TypeKey on their weblogs have virtually eliminated comment spam from their weblogs.
- Second, we’ll add the ability for you to moderate comments and trackbacks. You’ll be able to pre-screen comments and trackbacks and approve them before they appear on your published weblog.
- Finally, on top of the authentication and moderation functionality, we’re working on a greatly enhanced set of screens in TypePad for managing comments and trackbacks. The goal of the improvements is to make it easier to scan and quickly take action on new comment activity, including deleting comments, approving or deleting moderated commenters, or banning unwanted commenters from your site.
Great news! I especially like the idea of TypeKey authentication. I’ve long wondered by this hasn’t been implement for TypePad.
And while I’m not a fan of comment moderation, it’s good to know that I will have the option to implement it if I wanted to. Right now, if anyone with a TypePad blog gets hit by, say, a comment spam attack, all you can really do is switch off commenting completely.
Related NevOn posts:
Hi there Neville. I, too, welcomed the news. Reading between the lines, there’s no sign of the hinted-at automatic trackbacks to posts mentioned. Maybe that was a step too far.
Also, I feel I should mention that if spam is currently coming from a limited number of sources, you can block their IP addresses, rather than switch commenting off altogether.
Interesting. Expression Engine already offers all these features.
You’re right Shel, and other weblog management systems offer anti-spam features of one sort or another. Movable Type does, for instance (on which much of TypePad is based).
But hosted services like TypePad haven’t (at least, the TypePad Plus service level I have hasn’t). None of them do, as far as I’m aware. So until now, if you want the sort of protection that Six Apart is now planing to implement, your choices are very limited with a hosted service.
Thanks for that info, David. The trouble with IP address blocking is that smart spammers vary those addresses. So if you block one it doesn’t mean that the spammer actually gets blocked for good.