Faster, Easier Commenting

You commented, and we listened: one of the things you like best about your blog is hearing what readers have to say via comments they leave on your posts. So, we're continuing to work on features to help make the commenting experience faster, easier and more engaging. So today we’re beginning the process of rolling out Ajax commenting natively in the TypePad application. 

To be clear -  this isn't the same as TypePad Connect, which is an optional beta commenting system you can try. We've been reading and thinking about your comments, and we want to make sure that while Connect is in beta, everyone's got the best, easiest, fastest commenting on TypePad, hands down!

You don’t need to do anything to get the new TypePad commenting experience. It's a natural improvement to the current comments, and we'll be rolling it out to everyone over the next two weeks.

Here's tour of the new features...

A new look for the commenting form

We've updated the commenting form to move the most important part -- the comment field -- to the top so commenters aren't distracted by having to enter their contact info first. We've also added intelligence so it doesn't let commenters post until they've entered a comment (and name and email if you require that too).

On-page CAPTCHA and preview

One of your most common requests has been that we host the entire commenting process directly on the post page, rather than take your commenters through multiple interstitial pages. We heard you, and we've changed the commenting flow so that everything from the comment preview to the CAPTCHA is hosted directly on your post page. This is especially helpful for those of you using Advanced Templates, as it means your commenters will no longer see the preview and CAPTCHA on a page that doesn't match your blog's design

Preview for moderated comments

We've heard from some of you that you often receive the same comment multiple times when comment moderation is turned on, because the commenter is unsure of whether it's been received. To help assure commenters that their comment has been saved and is awaiting approval, we now show them a preview of their comment on the blog, and have restyled the comment moderation message to make it more likely to be seen.

Tell us what you think

As always, we want to hear from you. Leave a comment to this post telling us what you like, what you don't like or if you found anything confusing or hard to use. Think you see a bug? Let us know in the comments, or by opening a help ticket.