Improving the Spam Problem for Blog Authors

We know that several blog owners have been impacted by an issue where your own comments on your blog have been misidentified as spam.

Spam is our top issue and we're happy to announce today that we've made some changes to the system to help combat this.  Blog authors should no longer see their comments caught by the spam filter if you're signed into your Typepad account when commenting.

To make sure you're signed into your Typepad account, you should check what you see when commenting.  If you see the form that asks you to enter your name, e-mail address, and URL, then you're not signed in.  You need to click the Typepad link above the comment box and login before commenting:

Once you've clicked this link and signed in, the name, e-mail address, and URL fields will disappear and you'll see that you're logged in:

Go ahead and make your comment and you should see it posted to your blog (unless you've enabled comment moderation) and not caught in the spam filter.

We appreciate everyone's patience while this was being worked on. We know that this was an inconvenience.  This is a just a first step in plans we have to continue to improve the spam filter so that all of our users can have an improved commenting experience.

Comments

[The Proprietor]

My biggest problem now is that regular contributors are being knocked into the spam filter -- I've told them to make their comment, then email me separately so I can fish it out of the spam filter. Can we create a "white list" so these folks don't get knocked out of the dialogue?

[APA Style]

I agree with the above commenter regarding not knocking comments from regular contributors into the spam filter.

Another issue we've noticed is that while the system seems to now handle an author replying to a comment, if that author previews the comment, then edits and posts, the comment is dumped into the "spam" folder. Since we do like to preview (and edit when appropriate), can this be fixed?

Thanks for working on this issue!

[The Typepad Team]

We are definitely with you on that! It's the next thing on our list and we're working on it currently. We hope to have all legitimate comments published on the blog and kept away from the spam filter ASAP. Thanks for hanging in there!

[The Typepad Team]

We are with you on that! See our reply to the comment above. Thanks for speaking out! Thanks as well for the information on the preview issue. We'll look into it!

[Kymberlie]

Several of us on the Typepad team weren't able to reproduce this.

So that we can look into the problem further, could you go to the Help tab within Typepad and create a new ticket? We can then work with you directly on the issue.

Thanks!