Talk about annoying, but now it seems my TypePad comment woes have graduated to “irritating.” I wrote earlier about overzealous comment filters but now it’s gotten worse, much worse. Over the last week I’ve come to realize that I cannot leave any comments on any TypePad hosted blog using this domain name (makeyoughmm.com) in either the URL or email field. I’ve talked to a few TypePad blog owners about this and those who have responded have said that they aren’t blocking my comments so I decided to go to TypePad and see what kind of help I could get from them, and to try out TypePad for the first time.

The first thing I discovered is that you can’t submit a support ticket unless you are a paying customer so I signed up for my own TypePad blog and put in my credit card info. After creating a test blog at tdavid.typepad.com, lo and behold (see screenshot above) I could not even add comments to my own paid blog!

So I submitted a support ticket with the following text and waited:

No matter what I do, TypePad won’t let me post comments on my own blog. It keeps saying “it looks like spam” even though I have not added any IPs to my ban list. Here is the information I’m using:

My Name: TDavid
My Email: ___ at makeyougohmm dot com
My URL: http://www.makeyougohmm.com/

Why is it blocking me from posting on my own TypePad (paid) blog? Please advise.

Try commenting using that information (use any email address, it doesn’t matter), if they haven’t fixed this issue then you’ll see exactly what I’m seeing at the time of this writing: it doesn’t matter what IP or what host you post from. The TypePad support ticket submit process is very easy and straightforward. They have an “open tickets” system to follow along with what’s happening.

About an hour later a support response came asking me the following:

Are you using an open proxy to connect to the internet? Do you see an image on the page and you can type in text in the image?

Let’s just assume for a moment that I’m a fairly new user to the web, because I bet the larger percentage of bloggers using TypePad are not experienced webmasters. So, I wonder, how many regular and even some experienced users even know what an open proxy is? Also, what image? Does the support rep mean CAPTCHA image? Haven’t seen one. After doing some more testing I learned that by changing any instance of makeyougohmm.com from the URL and email address I could post comments on every TypePad blog. I explained this in part of my response:

For example if I change to this (from what I submitted before) I can successfully make comments:

Name: TDavid email: MY EMAIL at gmail.com URL: http://spaces.msn.com/members/TDavid

Note that the only thing removed/changed was my domain: makeyougohmm.com.
See test here: http://tdavid.typepad.com/tds_typepad_blog/
2004/12/testing_typepad.html

Is your backend code blacklisting my domain (makeyougohmm.com) or something?

In this same response instead of saying “no way do I use an open proxy!” I had a momentary brain bug meltdown and typed yes instead of no. Ever done that? Grrr. So I quickly updated my original support ticket response with:

Hmm, I mispoke in my first comment I’m *not* using an open proxy. I’m running tests on my connection to see if there’s any vulnerability. It’s very odd that by changing the information with the same connection that it gets through which makes me think that your system has somehow blacklisted my domain makeyougohmm.com.

And so I waited. And this morning I keep waiting. That was 4:55pm PST yesterday. I guess they don’t have 24/7 support and/or the ticket got elevated to someone who might know more about what’s going on. I’ll update this entry or write another when this situation is resolved. In the meantime, though, I can see why some people are angry about Six Apart and comment spam. Here I am, a legitimate blogger and commenter, NOT a freaking spammer, and I’m being treated like one.

Tyme comments on Blog Your Way:

That doesn�t fix the fact that my trust is broken and to be fair, I did post on how I thought Anil�s personal touch in responses was great. However, when I made the post I did not realize the comment spam issue was basically solved on TypePad months ago. How do I tell my clients it�s okay to use MovableType? How do I honestly say they have the same passion towards the software as they once did? I�m writing a book and I honestly do not feel as comfortable as I once did recommending the software.

I can make comments on Movable Type using makeyougohmm.com as the domain, but I cannot do so on any TypePad blog. This type of issue is what makes me think that third party hosted blogs are just bad news for bloggers. It looks like Tyme switched to Wordpress, which we’ve used happily for several of our blogs. I’ve never started a blog using Movable Type though I do participate to a heavily trafficked group blog that uses Movable Type and they have had their share of issues too. I can’t say my experience with either Movable Type or TypePad blogs from a usability standpoint has been positive, sorry 6 and MT/TypePad users. Probably 20% of the people in my blogroll use Typepad or MT blogs. Sure, most Typepad and MT blogs look great (asthetically pleasing designs), but how many people read blogs through aggregators and rarely surf the blog from the web?

This morning I decided to do some additional testing/checking. Before making this blog post I went to our office and tried via DSL instead of cable (different IP, different computers, different situation) and couldn’t make it work there either. I did notice, however, that I could get it to take my email address but not my domain — any of my domains — on one of our dedicated servers with one of the hosting companies we use. This includes about 20 websites (domains) on that particular server. So now I’m thinking that TypePad is running some sort of server based blocking and for whatever inexplicable reason has chosen to add my server to this list. I also checked a second dedicated server that we use with the same host and I can post using those domains. Why would TypePad block all my domains on one server? I’m very curious how or why they would do this?

I just checked again: 10:15am PST of day #2, still the ticket says: “Awaiting staff response” — that just about says it all.

Update Dec 27, 2004: This has been fixed! (Their engineer said I had “inherited a spammer’s IP … from a long time ago”).

• TypePad comments resolution
• TypePad support recommends using proxy to get around their own anti-spam filters
• Overzealous comment spam filters and Scoble pondering full text hotlinking
• The devil in the details of how domain expiration really works
• Complimentary comment spammers
• Can’t find a domain? Try a domain hack