Trusted Commenters

With Movable Type 3.2's focus on enabling community, we wanted to make sure that a blog administrator can recognize the people who build the community around a weblog. And if you're keeping a personal blog, you want to make sure your friends feel welcome when they visit your site.

TypeKey Authentication

Last year, we released the TypeKey authentication service to allow commenters to identify themselves in a consistent manner. This lets site owners assign persistent rules to an individual that act every time that person visits a blog. Since then, over a million people have signed in with the service, and a thriving community has sprung up around the TypeKey service and protocol.

The TypeKey authentication service can be used in custom applications written in any common programming language, and the TypeKey protocol has open documentation which has resulted in the creation of several third-party authentication systems that can be used in place of the TypeKey service. Requiring comment authentication has also become a very powerful way to nearly eliminate comment spam.

But, though an original goal for TypeKey was to provide a consistent identity for the purpose of banning spammers or abusive commenters, there are millions of positive contributions being made by authenticated commenters. So, the new version of the Movable Type platform features a new trusted status for commenters that lets you flag any individual as welcome in your community.

Trusted Commenters

By default, Movable Type 3.2's support for trusted commenters lets you flag any authenticated commenter as trusted. Trusted commenters are marked with a special icon in all application listings, and comments from trusted commenters are always whitelisted, so they're never sent to Movable Type's new junk folder.

In addition, trust status is an integral part of the commenter object within Movable Type. This means that plugin developers can build behaviors around a commenter's trust status, giving trusted commenters a custom display or granting them permissions on the system to do things like modify a comment's junk status.

In all, the authentication provided by TypeKey and TypeKey-compatible services, combined with the new ability to mark any individual as a trusted member of your community, should help you get the best possible feedback on all your blogs.

[This is part nine in a series called "Our 32 Favorite Features of Movable Type 3.2".]