Burningbird: TypeKey: The Patriot Act of Weblogging
Following the hype about MovableType 3.0 and SixApart’s new TypeKey system, I’m not sure my feelings are any warmer than Shelley’s.
A centralized database to manage part of a decentralized success seems like a bad idea. As noted, there are plenty of times when the centralized servers (hello, weblogs.com and technorati) fail under load, causing problems for their end-user sites.
I agree that some kind of authentication makes sense, but why not something like what Mailman or other mailing lists require? The steps:
* compose your comment/feedback
* enter an email
* await the authorization email from the MT instance
* reply to it, and your comment is posted *and* the weblog operator has something like contact information for you. You could still be a spammer, but this is all about raising the bar/making it more difficult. No one thinks spam is preventable.
And I hadn’t thought of some of the possibilities: if I ban commenter Adolf from my site and his pals Benito and Christof approve him to comment on theirs, where are the permissions invoked?
I hope they have spent as much time and effort on addressing the performance issues as they have on this idea . . .
To be fair, Mena Trott’s comments in the thread make it clear that there’s more work to be done on this, but this is an issue webloggers feel strongly about: they need to get it right.