Announcing! New and improved ways to share posts and fight spam

Today we released improvements that tackle two separate features: social media sharing; and comment CAPTCHAs. The first is an update that provides a new feature for sharing to Facebook and Twitter from the Compose screen. The second is an update in the form of an overhauled CAPTCHA that will help the fight against spam comments.

Sharing posts to Twitter and Facebook

For those of you who share your posts from the Compose screen, you'll notice a new feature improvement for when you check the boxes of your Facebook and Twitter accounts. Now, when checked, a text box will appear directly below the account(s) you've selected. This text box will allow you to completely customize the message that is sent to your Facebook Wall or Twitter account.

With Facebook, your message will appear with the shared post link, thumbnail (if an image is added to the post), and excerpt.

With Twitter, your message will appear with the post link. Bonus! You'll be able to @message and #hashtag your Twitter message, as well as keep an eye on the character limit! (Note: character limit is automatically reduced to 110 characters so as to leave enough characters for the post link that is shared.)

Improving comment CAPTCHAs

To help continue our fight against the evils of spam, we have made changes to the CAPTCHA we serve with comments. We've chosen to integrate Google's reCaptcha, which will help detect between a real person and a computer/bot.

The image above is what unauthenticated commenters will see if their comment triggers the CAPTCHA to appear, or if you've made the "randomly generated verification code" a requirement in your Comment settings. You'll notice that you'll be able to listen to the CAPTCHA, as well as refresh it if you're unable to read the words shown, making the CAPTCHA process more accessible for all commenters.

As an additional bonus, for those who previously saw the CAPTCHA cut-off in the Firefox browser, that issue should no longer be present.

Comments

[Ranu Rajkarnikar]

Awesome!! I loveee the new social sharing features. Good job Typepad team :)

[Sean]

any chance you could make this new captcha system more user friendly? i don't blog, but the one i do frequent daily is a typepad blog and having to go through this process over and over is a nightmare. so much so that i'd rather not comment anymore, to be honest. does this have an internal feature to learn about valid commenters, such as Akismet?

[Bri]

Thanks! We're all thrilled with the update to the sharing, so we're glad you are too. :)

[Bri]

Hi Sean! The CAPTCHA should only appear if: (1) you are not logged into Typepad or your OpenID account (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, Google, etc); or (2) the blog owner has set it up so that all commenters are required to see the CAPTCHA. Above the comment form there should be a section that says, "sign in with..." and a list of the main OpenID options, including Typepad and a "more" link. If you click one of those, sign in to the service, you'll be taken back to the comment form where you can write and submit your comment. Doing that will authenticate you as a commenter, meaning you won't see the CAPTCHA screen.

With regard to an internal feature to track valid/authenticated commenters, we don't have something like that in place right now, but may be something we take into consideration in the future.

[Alexandria, Professional Bagpiper AFM Local 349]

Thank you so much! As a visually impaired person using a screen reader, this improvement is just what I needed! Now I can participate in the community!

[Bri]

Thank you so much, Alexandria. I'm really glad that this improvement will help you to become a greater part of the Typepad blogs and communities in which you participate. :D

[altongansky]

Nice. Thanks.

[Roger Sharp]

Just noticed the new sharing feature earlier.
Awesome work :)

[Agnes]

Thanks for explaining it. I am not a fan of captcha either (so hard to read!) but then again spam is worse :-)

[Kofla Olivieri]

I can't stand CAPTCHA, it is a pain. :-)

[achtungbabyblog]

hooray on being able to hash tag the twitter sharing

[Jennifer]

Great! Love the 'annotating' social media posts feature. I've never needed to use captcha as I get very little spam. (Lucky me?)

[Eric Alvarez]

Good news! I was waiting for the opportunity to customize sharing via my Twitter account : )

[Tameka Mullins (Tamstarz)]

I was pleasantly surprised to see the Twitter option when I created a post earlier! I didn't see the option for Facebook though. These are great improvements. Most appreciated!

[watertiger]

The new captcha didn't seem to stop spammers from littering my blog. Improved generic Viagra, anyone?

[The Plain Truth]

The sharing feature is a moot point in the editor screen as it does not allow your link on FaceBook to be shared! One has to manually ad the story to Facebook, so your friends can share your work to others, so it is worthless to me.

[Account Deleted]

Hope it will help bloggers

[Debra Hamel]

Great. Now if you'd just make it so that the link isn't automatically added I'd be very happy (and wouldn't have to use dlvr.it to send my blog posts to Twitter). It's not always the case that someone wants to send Twitter users back to the post. The case in point is my blog http://www.thetwitterherodotus.com, which is posted via dlvr.it to http://www.twitter.com/iherodotus.

[jeffys blog]

great new things to click on and i do love the sharing thingys

[Sandra Lomas]

can we turn the captcha off?

[Account Deleted]

Great! Thanks Typepad team.

[PurposefulGirl]

Help!!!

I'm not seeing the text box beneath Facebok and Twitter tick boxes..is this enabled for all Pro users?