Moderate Comments, Trackbacks or Both (with TypePad's New & Improved Feedback Interface)

Until today, if you wanted to moderate comments or trackbacks, you had to set the preferences for both at the same time. It was an all-or-nothing deal. Moderating allows you to hold for approval, making sure that a comment or trackback is something you want published to your blog before it goes live. Today, TypePad made some changes to the interface to make it easier to choose how you want to moderate feedback on your blog. They've separated controls over comments and trackbacks and provided a new page where you can enter your desired settings.

On high traffic blogs with good participation, it's often impractical to moderate comments… it just slows the conversation down and can create a bit of a workload for the blogger. On the other hand, trackbacks are much more likely to be spam and generally don't need to be posted immediately to have value when they are legit. So separating the controls for these two types of feedback makes a lot of sense. In fact, it's brilliant.

Introducing… the new Feedback page (found under the Weblog Configure tab). Here's a screen capture that shows you the various options for comments:

And here's what you can do with trackbacks:

In the post announcing the new interface and controls at Everything TypePad, the recommended settings are as follows:

Our recommended configuration for active blogs is moderating TrackBacks, requiring CAPTCHA for unauthenticated comments, and providing users the ability to sign in via TypeKey to comment.

I prefer requiring email to using CAPTCHAs, just because I hate having to fill in CAPTCHAs myself when responding to comments. Plus, I'm finding that the amount of spam comments has gone down massively since I started blocking URLS with the recent addition of word banning. But the beauty is that you can do one, the other or both.

I'm definitely going to be moderating trackbacks from now on, now that I can allow the comments to go through unimpeded!

Comments

[Posted: May 26, 2006 5:26:53 PM]

This is a big upgrade for me. I dont get much comment spam [knock on wood], but I get a high amount of trackback spam. This takes care of that issue.

[Posted: May 27, 2006 10:05:55 AM]

Tom,

same here. All the spam seems to be trackbacks for me these days.

[Posted: May 27, 2006 10:48:37 AM]

I tried dropping moderation in favor of just CAPTCHAs and got comment spam within a few hours. I turned off track-back spam entirely.

[Posted: Jun 2, 2006 4:20:09 PM]

Yay!! I was so happy to see this!

[Posted: Jun 2, 2006 4:20:15 PM]

Yay!! I was so happy to see this!

[Posted: Aug 21, 2007 12:50:08 PM]

I'm making an advanced Typepad template and I'm almost done with it except for the "Comments Preview" template (this is the page after you press the preview button on the comment form). Whenever i press the preview template button, it generates in a template that I cannot find on my list of template files. Does anybody know how to fix this? or Modify the comment preview page?

Thanks in Advance.