The Comment Settings screen allows you to configure whether your blog will accept comments, what methods, if any, Movable Type will use to authenticate your commenters, and how Movable Type will publish those comments to your blog.

Accept / Do Not Accept comments

The comment settings screen includes a setting that controls whether or not your blog will accept comments at all. If it is enabled, comments will be accepted. This is the default setting for all new blogs. If this option is disabled, the remainder of the options on this screen will not be displayed.

Commenting Policy

The Commenting Policy section allows you to configure your preferences for comment moderation, what HTML Movable Type will accept or publish in comments, whether the "nofollow" directive will be applied to URLs, and whether authors will be notified by email that a reader has left a new comment.

• Immediately Approve Comments: This setting allows you to control whether incoming comments are immediately published or queued for moderation based on the commenter's status.

• Allow HTML: This setting defines whether commenters can include HTML in the body of their comment. If this is enabled, HTML is permitted in the comment body. If disabled, all HTML will be stripped from the body of the comment when the comment is published. The setting is enabled by default on new blogs.

• Limit HTML Tags: This setting is only displayed if you have enabled the "Allow HTML" setting, and allows you to configure which tags are allowed in comment bodies. The default and recommended settings will enable the following tags in comment bodies: a href, b, i, br, p, strong, em, ul, ol, li, blockquote and pre. You can alternatively provide your own comma-delimited list of HTML tags that you would prefer to allow in your comment bodies.

• Apply nofollow to URLs: This setting allows you to configure whether the "nofollow" link relation is assigned to all URLs in both comments and TrackBacks. If enabled, this setting will add rel="nofollow" to all link tags submitted in comments and TrackBacks. (Learn more about nofollow.)

• Disable nofollow for trusted commenters: If this option is selected, the nofollow link relation will not be applied to any comments left by trusted commenters.

• Email Notification: This setting configures whether Movable Type will send an entry or page's author an email notification when a comment is received. If you choose "Only when attention is required" email will only be sent when a comment has been moderated and requires approval before being published to your blog.

Comment Display Options

The Comment Display Options section allows you to configure how comments will appear on your weblog, what text fomatting options will be provided, what CAPTCHA provider you will use, and whether your commenters will be redirected to a comment confirmation page after leaving a comment.

• Comment Order: This setting controls the order in which comments are displayed in your weblog, as well as printed out by the MTComments tag when no sort_order attribute is included with the tag. By default, comments are displayed in chronological (ascending) order.

• Auto-link URLs: This option determines whether URLs that are provided by commenters will automatically be turned into hyperlinks. This setting is enabled by default for new blogs.

• Text Formatting: This option determines the text formatting that will be applied to comments when they are published. The default option for new blogs is "Convert Line Breaks," though any other text formatting options that are installed with your system are also provided as options. Besides "Convert Line Breaks" Movable Type 4 by default provides Markdown, Markdown with Smarty Pants, Textile 2 and none.

• CAPTCHA Provider: This option determines whether commenters will be presented with a CAPTCHA when submitting a comment, and which CAPTCHA provider is used to serve up the CAPTCHA image. The default option for new blogs in Movable Type is "none." Movable Type 4 ships with its own CAPTCHA implementation, which requires that ImageMagick be installed alongside Movable Type.

• Use Comment Confirmation Page: This option determines whether Movable Type 4 will present a confirmation page to the user after they leave a comment on your blog. This may be a useful way to present a "jumping off point" for the commenter instead of delivering them directly back to the individual entry archive page. The comment confirmation page is defined the "Comment Response" system template. Learn more about system templates.