Commenter Management in Movable Type 3.2

One of the primary concerns for this new release of Movable Type was to really enable the creation and management of a community around your blogs. But you can't build your community unless you know who's participating in it, so we've made individual profile pages for each commenter who provides feedback on your blog, along with powerful new listings pages for managing the members of your community.

What's New Since The Last Version?

In Movable Type 3.0x and 3.1x, the platform offered a simple listing of commenters with the commenter's status (whether they were banned or approved), their name, a link to their TypeKey profile, and some simple tools to approve or ban the commenter.

With the new version, we've retained all of this information, but radically improved its presentation and utility and added significant detail and context to the display. This information can help you to encourage positive contributions, reduce the impact of trolls or disruptive community members, and in general know more about the people who help keep your blog active.

The new commenter listing has all the power of Movable Type's new listings pages, but provides email and URL links for each commenter who's provided that information, so you can respond directly to a community member when they've made a contribution. In addition, there's a count of all of a person's comments and the date of their most recent comment, since activity is a good indicator of their commitment to your community.

As always, you can filter for a subset of your commenters, take bulk actions like banning or unbanning, or trusting or untrusting an individual or group of commenters. Even better, each listing lets you drill down into an individual commenter's profile page.

Commenter Profiles

Each person who leaves a comment on your system has an individual record you can use to find out more about the person, or to review their contributions to your site. All known information about the commenter is displayed, including name, URL, email, and profile links. In addition, a listing of all comments from that user is presented, and with the new ability to customize listings, you can even view the full content of their comments inline for convenience.

As in the main commenter listing, you have a full slate of management actions that can be performed on a commenter, including marking a commenter as trusted or untrusted, banned or unbanned.

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