Seeing An Increase In Spam?

Spam! No one likes it. We've heard reports of some people experiencing an uptick in spam as of late. If you're seeing spam comments, please make sure you're marking these comments as spam. Don't just delete them.

To mark a comment on TypePad as spam, click on the checkbox in your "list comments" section, and make sure you click "mark this comment as spam". This will ensure that this comment is flagged in our system, and we can better train our spam filters better as to how to block them from TypePad.

Want to know more? Check out our Knowledge Base article on managing comments to find more details.

The Latest Update To TypePad

In our latest update, we made several fixes and improvements to TypePad that you've let us know were sorely needed.

A big one was fixing up how our Atom feeds were publishing - which was updating too quickly, causing some folks using TypePad as a newsletter service to be unhappy. We fixed this to update only if there was a major change to the post. Thanks to those of you who hung in there with us on that one - Gretchen from The Happiness Project, Joseph Jaffe's Jaffe Juice,  CK's blog, and Second Thoughts among a few others.

We've set your authentication settings for new blogs to default to "optional", which means users can sign in with TypePad Connect if they like, but they don't have to. Before, this was set to "off", which meant that some folks weren't getting the quality information about their community that they wanted!

We made several other fixes too:

• New feedback form
• Fix a bug with email field in new ajax commenting
• Fixed a bug with our iPhone webclip.
• Fixed a bug with the favicon not appearing in all blogs.
• TypePad Connect: some people were not able to delete comments, and this has been fixed.
• TypePad Connect: some people were unable to publish moderated comments, and this has been fixed.

We're continuing to make improvements all the time, so let us know your thoughts in the comments!

Feedback in moderation, and a new Widget

This afternoon we released two new features that are the latest in our efforts to provide TypePad bloggers the best tools for growing and managing an active community of readers and commenters.

• You can now moderate TrackBacks independently of comments.  Before today, our moderation preference was set on both types of feedback at once.  Now you can choose to moderate one, the other or both.  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.

• It’s now much easier to set those feedback preferences.  Even though they’re the kind of preferences you want to set and forget, we still want to make the experience as straightforward as possible.  The Weblog Configure tab now has a new “Feedback” page for setting your preferences for how your blog should handle inbound comments and TrackBacks.

Additionally, we just posted a new Widget that shows off a little bit of what's possible with the magical combination of Widgets and JavaScript.  We've heard frequently that users want to have links to outside sites open in a new Window; this new widget does exactly that by installing a simple bit of JavaScript on your blog.  We've got a few more of those in development, so stay tuned... 

Word banning, and a word of thanks

The storm seems to have passed, and to mark a day of (relative) calm, this evening we introduced a new feature to TypePad: Word Banning.

You can now block comments and TrackBacks from reaching your blog if they contain words or phrases that you find offensive. For example: say that are you sick and tired of comments on your blog about Mary Poppins. Now you can simply ban the word "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" and comments that contain that quite atrocious word will be stopped before they reach your blog.

Word and IP Address Banning in TypePad

Banning keywords is easy. We've combined word banning and IP banning into a single page in your Control Panel. IP banning continues to behave as it always has on TypePad -- adding an IP address to the list will block any comments or TrackBacks which are sent from that address.

Speaking of banning IP addresses... We want to thank everyone in the extended Six Apart community for all of the supportive emails, IMs and blog posts we've received in the last 24 hours. The team here appreciates it very, very much.

A Quick How-To for Requiring CAPTCHAs

On Tuesday, we added a new tool to help prevent spam comments from being posted to your blog. Using CAPTCHAs to validate commenters as actual humans, and not machines or spambots, is a powerful way to ensure that only legitimate comments are published.

You can enable the CAPTCHA option by going to the "Edit Configuration" link in the Weblogs tab. Click through "Preferences" and scroll down to Comment and TrackBack Preferences. There, check the box for "Require unauthenticated commenters to validate with a CAPTCHA?" and save your changes at the bottom of the page.

After republishing your blog, commenters will be shown a CAPTCHA image to enter before their comment is published.

Note that if you have Comment Authentication set to "Required," the option to require validation with a CAPTCHA will be unavailable. In this case, commenters will be validated with their TypeKey identities.

More information about this, and all of TypePad's other features, can be found in our searchable Knowledge Base.

CAPTCHA on comments, and a round of bug fixes

This evening we added an oft-requested feature to TypePad, and cleaned up some of the bugs and annoyances that have been bothering you...and us!

First, the feature:  you can now require unauthenticated commenters (who don't sign in through TypeKey) to pass a CAPTCHA test before their comment is posted to your blog.  The CAPTCHA (a ""completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart") will help prevent automated robots from posting comment spam to your blog.  We have more feedback management features in development to help you control the comments and TrackBacks on your blog, and will be rolling those out over the next month.

And here are some of the bug fixes I'm sure you'll be interested in learning about:

• We fixed an issue where our QuickPost screen wasn't automatically grabbing Amazon's product identifier (ISBN on books or ASIN on music).  So you can now once again QuickPost to your reading and music lists with ease.
• We fixed an issue with our WYSIWYG editor and Internet Explorer where the editor was adding some extra (and unwanted!) style declarations to blockquote tags.
• Commenters can now use the "strike" tag in comments, if your weblog is configured to allow HTML in comments.
• We fixed a bug where the time displayed when comments are previewed was incorrect.
• We added support for the popular "m4v" format for videocasting.  If you upload an m4v file into your post, your RSS 2.0 feed will now properly add that file as an enclosure.  Go forth and videocast!

We have plenty of features and fixes in the pipeline, so stay tuned for more...