The Feedback Rating System in Movable Type 3.2

For a lot of bloggers, participating in a community online is what motivates us and keeps us blogging. Good feedback from commenters and people sending TrackBacks can keep a weblog alive and vibrant, but negative comments or, worst of all, the plague of spam, can take all the satisfaction out of maintaining a blog.

Because nothing's more frustrating than spammers or trolls ruining your community, we've tried to make sure you have strong anti-spam tools out of the box in this new version of Movable Type. But eliminating the annoyance of spam is where the new community management features start, not where they end. So, we've made a powerful new Feedback Rating System in Movable Type 3.2.

If you're familiar with SpamAssassin — the wildly popular email spam filter — you probably already understand a lot of how this works. Our feedback rating framework scores comments and TrackBacks in real-time as they are received, and the system has the ability to take action on the basis of those scores.

There are a few differences from SpamAssassin-style systems, though. First, our framework is plugin-based, which lets you choose which types of rules work best for you, and provides the ability to quickly adapt and customize your system as necessary. (One of the best ways to make it hard for spammers is to make sure each installation of a system is unique, or at least less predictable, in the way it behaves.) Second, the system isn't just for fighting spam: Any feedback item can be have a positive score making it easy to promote the best content your community has to offer. And all of the rules that rate your feedback can work together, making a total judgement on the comments and TrackBacks that enter the system.

From the standpoint of fighting spam, there's no question that a collaborative, scoring-based framework works. Unlike previous version of Movable Type, plugins can finally work together to assess the desirability of a comment or TrackBack without stepping on one another's toes. Plus, when spammers change their tactics, the plugin developer community can respond quicker, with simpler plugins that add simple rules to counter new threats. And popular anti-spam or community management plugins from older versions of Movable Type, such as SpamLookup or Blacklist or Moderate, will of course still continue to work.

Whether you use the new rating framework to highlight your best commenters or send your most unwelcome to the dustbin, we are sure that you will find the feedback rating framework to be one of the best additions to Movable Type in a long time.

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