Blogger Comment Moderation & Outage Indicator

Blogger has introduced a frequently-asked for feature, "Comment Moderation". By using this feature, you can approve or reject what would-be commenters are looking to post before it goes live on your blog. This is useful in situations where you're looking for a bit more control over the conversation hosted on your blog. Additionally, comment moderation will prevent unwanted comment spam if previous deterrents like word verification have proven insufficient. You can choose to moderate your comments via either e-mail or from blogger.com. To enable the feature go to "Settings" and then the "Comment" tab of your blog. As always, more information on how to use this feature can be found in the Blogger Help section.

I might give this new comment moderation option a try, although it may only be temporary if it gets annoying. This will help cut down on the spam and other nonsense posts that have cluttered up my blog's comment section. In the past some people have complained about having to weed thru alot of junk just to get to the "real comments", so I'm hoping this solves that problem without needing to turn off the ability for users to post anonymously if they choose to do so. So post your comments as usual. When comment moderation is turned on and you click publish comment, a message at the very top of the page will say "Your comment has been saved and will be visible after blog owner approval".

In addition to "Comment Moderation", something called "Outage Indicator" has been introduced by the folks at Blogger. Every now and then the Blogger service is pulled offline to do some maintenance on their servers. In the past, the Blogger Status webpage was the most comprehensive place for outage alerts, but who wants to have to check another blog? So instead there is a new way to let you know of upcoming outages: the Blogger status indicator. It’ll show up on your Dashboard and on pages under the Posting tab and warn of any scheduled outages that might disrupt your posting. This indicator checks in with Blogger every minute to see if there’s an outage coming up. This means that, even if you’re working on a long post and haven’t refreshed the page in a while, you’ll get notification just the same. As an added bonus, if the indicator can’t get in touch with Blogger, either because it's down or because you’re not connected to the Internet, it’ll warn you that you probably won’t be able to post. Despite all this, if by some trick of fate you lose a post to a Blogger outage, to network trouble or to a browser crash, you can usually recover it by using your browser’s back button or the recover post link on the posting page.