More Tools for your Spam Fighting Arsenal
June 03, 2008
Last week, we announced TypePad AntiSpam, a spam blocking service that's already built into your TypePad account. If you want to go further with protecting your weblog from spam and other unwanted comments, TypePad has even more tools that will make you a spam fighting superhero!
The Word and IP Banning page, found in Control Panel > Site Access, can be used to ban IP addresses, keywords, phrases, URLs and email addresses. The form will accept any string of text, allowing you to cut spam comments off before they ever reach your blog. But be careful: the tool is powerful, so you'll want to consider whether a legitimate commenter might use a banned word or URL before adding it. There's more information about Word and IP Banning in our Knowledge Base.
There's an option to enable comment moderation, available in Weblogs > Configure > Feedback. Comment moderation allows you to see a new comment first instead of automatically publishing it to your blog, so you can have the chance to decide whether to publish, delete, report as spam, or leave the comment unpublished. This tool is helpful not just for fighting spam but also for ensuring that only the comments you want to show are published. You can learn more in Setting Your Weblog Comment and TrackBack Preferences.
Spammers will often target posts that are older, so we're adding an auto-close feature in Weblogs > Configure > Feedback. Auto-close will automatically close the comments to your posts after a specified period of time. You have several set time frames to choose from, ranging from one week to one year. This eliminates the need to go back to a post and manually close the comments - the system will do it for you! Note: Most of you can use this feature now, but some of you who are using Advanced Templates will not see the feature for another month or so. We're working to roll it out to everyone as soon as we can. There's more information in the Comment and TrackBack Preferences article.
We're always looking for new ways to help users protect their weblogs from spam. If you have any ideas for how we can improve or enhance these features, leave a comment and let us know!
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