A New Tool in the Fight Against Spammers

We hate spammers.  You hate spammers.  And we here at Typepad spend a lot of time fighting the good fight against them.  Our next step in this battle is giving you a new tool that should significantly cut down on the amount of comment spam you see.

This tool can be found by going to Settings > Comments and looking for the "Require readers to have Javascript enabled to comment" option.  By default, it will have been set to Yes.

With this enabled, readers will be required to have JavaScript turned on in their web browser.  The vast majority of people will have this enabled by default and this should impact very few of your readers.  Non-JavaScript sources, on the other hand, are mostly spammers, so this change means that most of the comments you'll receive from here on in will be from actual humans.

If you'd prefer to turn this option off, you can select the No option, but we do highly discourage this.

Please note that this settings does not apply to Typepad Connect comments since it requires JavaScript to be used.

We've made huge strides in dealing with spammers over the last year and we'll continue to keep improving and offering more tools to help.  We might hate spammers, but we love you.

Comments

[Jessie Ann Haynes]

I just left WordPress for the deluge of spam it couldn't keep out. Good to hear TypePad is fighting the good fight :-)

[Andersenseven]

I think a "spam" ad has been added to my blog...every time I open a post....a voice over ad come on...any ideas?

[Kymberlie]

I didn't get a voice-over when I went to your blog.

It's possible that you've picked up some malware on your computer. I'd recommend using a program like Ad-Aware to check it for any problems:
http://lavasoft.com/landing/comparison.php

If you continue to have issues, please do open a help ticket and someone will be happy to help you.

[Cop Car]

I had noticed the sudden drop-off from having 200-300 spam comments each day to having zero. Well done! I had been fighting the spam issue since last April.

[Faith in Context]

Amazing difference from the last time I cleaned out the spam. Thanks! But isn't it possible that the spammers can adjust to this change as easily as you can require it?

[Kymberlie]

Part of the problem with spam is that the spammers are contstantly adjusting to work around anything that we put in place. However, we'll continue to come up with more and better ideas to block them from commenting. We're in it for the long haul!

[davidinnv]

I agree with the above comments. My spam has virtually disappeared over the past few days, and I'm holding my breath, hoping this will continue. I will not miss all those ads for Viagra and various medical remedies, among other things.

Thank you!!

[Soglos Murray]

great addition, will turn this on and see what difference it makes :) keep up adding great features.

[Werner Patels]

I used to get a lot of robot spam... now, not anymore. All that rubbish got through despite captcha and other measures already in place. Now, crickets! I love it. Thank you, Typepad.

[Werner Patels]

I wanted to post a comment about this new feature, but even after two attempts, it doesn't show up. I am giving up.

I see.... this one got through now, but not my comment(s) where I wanted to praise the new Javascript feature. I suppose, we can't even use the word (s...) of the thing that this feature is trying to block. Weird.

[Tara Bradford]

Bravo, Typepad! Well done, you! What a big difference! Thank you for your efforts.

[Kymberlie]

I approved one of the other comments for you. It did indeed get caught in the filter.

We're glad to hear that it's working so well for you!