Lee Heidel

The End of an Era: Saying Goodbye to Typepad Anti-Spam

Typepad Antispam RIP

When the personal web was still new, actual real honest-to-goodness people left insightful, constructive and supportive comments on these new-fangled things called "blogs". Search engines saw the value in these personal communiques and drew a spider web of lines across the internet connecting personal publishers with like minds producing interesting, useful content. Blogs rose to the top of the search results pages. But like so many good things, it was short lived. 

Over time, spamming became de rigueur and comments were no longer left by people but malicious machines eager for inbound links. These comments were often nonsensical and made the source material look unprofessional and unmaintained, an easy target for distributing malware or worse: bad information. To combat this threat to blogging, anti-spam plugins and services sprung up. Wordpress users had Akismet. Movable Type and Typepad users had their own savior in Typepad Anti-Spam. Today, we say goodbye to the latter.

After Typepad's acquisition by Say Media, it seemed inevitable that assets would slowly be weaned from the portfolio. Their innovative spam blocking software has gone to Impermium. For now, requests from the Typepad Anti-Spam plugin will be auto-routed to Imperium's system and no immediate changes need to be made. If you're looking for another solution, Akismet has a Movable Type plugin that works very well and is a worthy replacement candidate for Typepad Anti-Spam. 

Spammers keep getting smarter. It's up to content creators to leverage the strengths of their CMS software to fight back. Plugins like Akismet, CAPTCHAs and Movable Type's own Spam threshold settings can be used in concert to build the strongest wall possible. If you need help enabling a new Spam protection strategy, let's talk.

The full text of the Typepad to Imperium switchover announcement is after the break. 



Hello there,

You're receiving this e-mail because you use Typepad Anti-Spam on your site. We wanted to let you know that we will soon be retiring this product on March 1st.

To make sure your anti-spam needs continue to be met, we've partnered with Impermium, the premier provider of social spam protection services. Impermium works with some of the largest sites on the web and are respected for their customer service, so we know you'll be in good hands. There will be no interruption of service and in the near term you do not need to do anything, as we will automatically route your requests to Impermium. In most cases going forward, they will be the ones working with you to combat comment spam. For high-volume and enterprise sites, Imperium will reach out to you to discuss paid products that may best suit your needs.

We'll get in touch with you before the transition takes place, but if you have any questions or need additional assistance, please let us know via our Help system or visit: http://impermium.com/typepad-antispam

Thanks,

The Typepad Team