[Feedback] Comments, Trackbacks and Spam Settings

The Feedback Settings screen allows you to configure whether your blog will accept comments/trackbacks, what methods, if any, Movable Type will use to authenticate your commenters, and how Movable Type will publish those comments to your blog.

Spam Settings

The Spam Settings page allows you to configure how Movable Type handles undesirable comments and TrackBack pings.

Auto-Deletion

When checked, Movable Type will automatically delete comments and TrackBacks designated as spam, after the period of time specified in the “Delete Spam After” option described below.

Delete Spam After

This option specifies the number of days that Movable Type will wait before auto-deleting spam. This option is only available if “Auto-Deletion” is checked.

Spam Score Threshold

This control provides a junk tolerance level for all comments and TrackBack pings received on a blog. The value of this setting will be considered the baseline for “non-junk” for all future feedback to the blog and any with a “Final feedback rating” lower than the threshold will be considered “junk”. This setting provides an administrator to lessen the impact of “noisy” yet effective anti-spam plugins. Threshold values can be any real number between -10 and 10 and can be adjusted via the slider although Six Apart strongly recommends the default value of “0.”

Include ‘nofollow’ in URLs

This setting allows you to configure whether the “nofollow” link relation is assigned to all URLs in both comments and TrackBacks. If enabled, this setting will add rel="nofollow" to all link tags submitted in comments and TrackBacks. (Learn more about nofollow.)

‘nofollow’ exception for trusted commenters

If this option is selected, the nofollow link relation will not be applied to any comments left by trusted commenters.

Comment Settings

Accept / Do Not Accept comments

The comment settings screen includes a setting that controls whether or not your blog will accept comments at all. If it is enabled, comments will be accepted. This is the default setting for all new blogs. If this option is disabled, the remainder of the options on this screen will not be displayed.

Commenting Policy

The Commenting Policy section allows you to configure your preferences for comment moderation, what HTML Movable Type will accept or publish in comments, whether the “nofollow” directive will be applied to URLs, and whether authors will be notified by email that a reader has left a new comment.

Immediately Approve Comments: This setting allows you to control whether incoming comments are immediately published or queued for moderation based on the commenter’s status.
Allow HTML: This setting defines whether commenters can include HTML in the body of their comment. If this is enabled, HTML is permitted in the comment body. If disabled, all HTML will be stripped from the body of the comment when the comment is published. The setting is enabled by default on new blogs.
Limit HTML Tags: This setting is only displayed if you have enabled the “Allow HTML” setting, and allows you to configure which tags are allowed in comment bodies. The default and recommended settings will enable the following tags in comment bodies: a href, b, i, br, p, strong, em, ul, ol, li, blockquote and pre. You can alternatively provide your own comma-delimited list of HTML tags that you would prefer to allow in your comment bodies.
Email Notification: This setting configures whether Movable Type will send an entry or page’s author an email notification when a comment is received. If you choose “Only when attention is required” email will only be sent when a comment has been moderated and requires approval before being published to your blog.

Comment Display Settings

This section allows you to configure how comments will appear on your site, what text formatting options will be provided, what CAPTCHA provider you will use, and whether your commenters will be redirected to a comment confirmation page after leaving a comment.

Comment Order: This setting controls the order in which comments are displayed in your weblog, as well as printed out by the mt:Comments tag when no sort_order attribute is included with the tag. By default, comments are displayed in chronological (ascending) order.
Auto-link URLs: This option determines whether URLs that are provided by commenters will automatically be turned into hyperlinks. This setting is enabled by default for new blogs.
Text Formatting: This option determines the text formatting that will be applied to comments when they are published. The default option for new blogs is “Convert Line Breaks,” though any other text formatting options that are installed with your system are also provided as options. Besides “Convert Line Breaks” by default provides Markdown, Markdown with Smarty Pants, Textile 2 and none.
CAPTCHA Provider: This option determines whether commenters will be presented with a CAPTCHA when submitting a comment, and which CAPTCHA provider is used to serve up the CAPTCHA image. The default option for new blogs in Movable Type is “none.” Movable Type ships with its own CAPTCHA implementation, which requires that ImageMagick be installed alongside Movable Type.
Use Comment Confirmation Page: This option determines whether Movable Type will present a confirmation page to the user after they leave a comment on your blog. This may be a useful way to present a “jumping off point” for the commenter instead of delivering them directly back to the individual entry archive page. The comment confirmation page is defined the “Comment Response” system template. Learn more about system templates.

Trackback Settings

The TrackBack Settings provides controls related to managing and monitoring TrackBack activity on your site.

Accept / Do Not Accept TrackBacks

Whether or not your blog (website) will accept TrackBacks at all. If it is enabled, TrackBacks will be accepted for any entries that have been configured to “Accept TrackBacks.” Unchecking this option disables the receipt of incoming TrackBack pings.

TrackBack Policy

The TrackBack Policy section allows you to configure your preferences for

Moderation: If this option is checked, all TrackBacks will be held for approval before they are published.
E-mail notification: This setting configures whether Movable Type will send an entry or page’s author an email notification when a TrackBack is received. If you choose “Only when attention is required,” email will only be sent when a TrackBack has been moderated and requires approval before being published to your blog.

TrackBack Options

The TrackBack Options section allows you to configure whether Movable Type will attempt to automatically discover URLs you are linking to in your posts, and attempt to send TrackBack pings to those sites.

Enable External TrackBack Auto-Discovery: When this option is enabled, Movable Type finds hyperlinks within entries that you save to external pages which support TrackBack and will automatically send a ping to those sites, just as if you had determined the TrackBack URLs yourself and entered them in manually in the Outbound TrackBack URLs box on the entry editing screen.
Enable Internal TrackBack Auto-Discovery: When this option is enabled, Movable Type finds hyperlinks within entries that you save to internal pages on your site which have TrackBacks enabled, will automatically send a ping to those pages, just as if you had determined the TrackBack URLs yourself and entered them in manually in the Outbound TrackBack URLs box on the entry editing screen.

Note: If outbound TrackBacks are disabled at the system level, these options will be ignored regardless of how they are configured.