Managing your Blog’s Commenters

When commenters either register with your system or authenticate to leave a comment on your blog, Movable Type creates a user record for them, and assigns the Commenter Role to that user. This gives blog administrators the ability to view a list of commenters on your blog, and even “trust” or “ban” the user, which impacts how Movable Type will publish comments from that user.

To view a list of commenters on your blog

• Choose Manage > Users from the main menu. This will display the Manage Users screen for the blog, and will default the list to all authors on the blog.
• Locate the Quickfilters tool on the right-hand side of the Manage Users screen and click on the “Commenters” link. This will filter your user view to a list of commenters that have left authenticated comments on your blog.

Viewing details about an individual commenter

• To view details about an individual commenter, click on their username. This will open the Commenter Details screen. From this screen you can view:
  • The commenter’s name
  • Their identity token (a field generated by Movable Type for users that have authenticated using an external authentication service)
  • Their email address (if it has been passed by the external authentication service)
  • Their site URL
  • Their status
• From this screen you can also navigate to a filtered view of all the comments left by the individual commenter. Locate the “Useful Links” tool on the right-hand side of the screen and click on “Comments from (commenter name).”

Trusting a commenter

Marking a commenter as “Trusted” means that their comments may be treated differently based on your Comment Settings. For example, you can have comments from a trusted commenter appear immediately on the site, and bypass any moderation.

To trust a commenter:

• From the Manage > Users screen, locate the commenter you wish to trust, and click on their username. This will open the Commenter Details screen.
• Click the “Trust” button at the bottom of the screen.

Banning a commenter

Banning a commenter means that comments from that user will be automatically marked as spam when they are submitted, and will not be published to your blog.

To ban a commenter:

• From the Manage > Users screen, locate the commenter you wish to trust, and click on their username. This will open the Commenter Details screen.
• Click the “Ban” button at the bottom of the screen.