TypePad Hacks

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.... 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.

5.4.06 If you read the comments on my recent post about CAPTCHAs, you noticed that Colleen at TypePad posted some very interesting info there about a powerful hack to combat spam. But be warned, this hack is in beta right now… I honestly must recommend that you hold off using it for the present until a few issues are resolved with the way it implements.... Below are Colleen's comment, Michael's response, and the warning that TypePad has posted on the IP banning page: The IP banning page can be used to block keywords, URLs, email addresses, etc: Posted by: Colleen | April 19, 2006 at 11:23 AM The word banning hack that Colleen posted about above is definitely a hack, and we're working on turning it into a real feature.... Posted by: Michael Sippey | April 22, 2006 at 05:33 PM I want to quote the warning from the IP banning page in full, since there is definitely a call to use caution if you play with this hack: When adding keywords or URLs to your comment ban list, be careful with words that can be used to form other partial words.... This means words like "theme," "therapist" and "theatre" would be banned from being used in a comment, even though they are not on the comment ban list.