TypePad’s new authentication features in place

Six Apart is working very quickly indeed this weekend to roll out the new features in TypePad that I mentioned yesterday as I can already see some of them in place.

For starters, they’ve increased the file storage allowance to 500Mb (up from 100Mb) and increased the monthly bandwidth allowance to 5Gb (up from 3Gb). That’s for the TypePad Plus service level. I’m especially pleased with the bandwidth increase as I’ve constantly exceeded my allowance by at least 100% each month for much of this year, with no penalty (thanks, TypePad). New design templates are in place, too, although I’ve not looked at those yet.

The big news, though, is the implementation of comment and trackback authentication and approval as part of some robust anti-spam measures:

• 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.
• Moderate comments and TrackBacks. You’ll be able to pre-screen comments and TrackBacks and approve them before they appear on your published weblog.
• 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.

This is a terrific move by Six Apart to enhance its hosted service offering and give users the levels of protection and control that really are essential now. While I’ve not had any serious spam issues so far, I have experienced a steady increase in comment and trackback spam over the past few months. At best, it is plain irritating and, at worst, is very time consuming to manually delete them and figure out which IP addresses to add to the banned list (that’s so time consuming that I just add every one of them now).

All of these measures are now in place. I plan to implement them on my blogs once Six Apart has finished with the roll-out work this weekend.

When you visit Typepad-hosted blogs this weekend, including mine, you might notice some peculiar layouts with odd font sizes, things not in the places you expect them to be, etc. Here’s why, from a post on the Six Apart Status Weblog last night:

Some published weblogs may currently be experiencing issues with layout and design. We know about the problem and are working hard to resolve it. Over the weekend we will be automatically republishing weblogs on TypePad in order to address this problem.

I do find it impressive that Six Apart can do all this major work, affecting every hosted blog, while the service stays up and running. If no major clangers are dropped, it will be worth suffering only some appearance issues as all the new features are fully implemented.

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