As a “Thank You” to Those Who Comment…
… I’ve made a couple changes to how this blog handles your comments.
1.) I’ve installed the Do Follow plugin by Denis de Bernardy. I’m willing to risk the drawbacks of someone spamming the comments in favor of letting those of you who comment here regularly get some “link love” in the process. If I end up spending all my time deleting/editing comments, I’ll obviously need to reconsider.
2.) I’ve installed the Comment Rankings plugin by Gary King. This one rewards frequent commenters with stars next to your name, like this:
You get one star for every 10 comments you make. I just installed this tonight, so other than Patrick, I have no idea who already has a star(s) next to their name. Only way to find out is to start commenting! 🙂
Recap: Followed links and pretty stars next to your name. Who loves ya, baby?
I like this idea. I wondered to implement it at my blog as well. Is this going to work with the newest WordPress?
Sweet! I got rid of the nofollow a long time ago as well.
Now all you need to do is get rid of the need to log in requirement. It’s one less roadblock for spontaneous folks like me who are top commenter’s on several blogs.
I love threaded comments. I also like the my avatars plugin. It helps people who comment get to know each other.
I do not think so. After opening commenting in this way, spam in comments would be serious problem.
That gives me a stronger reason to comment.
Btw, I don’t think spam will ever get their hand here because of the registration requirement.
I am not sure, but I had forum, where I discarded registration requirement. The spam increased like 4-5 times… :(. I did not have time to build special solution for this forum, so I came back to the registration.
I have a star, I’m a somebody 😉
Congratulations, so you are the star 🙂
Matt:
Nice work. A side benefit is these two tactics assembled in series are likely to increase site visits to feed reader ratio. I’m interested to hear how this affects your visits to the site over time. You might want to publicize this in some way graphically to let new visitors know your policy as well.
Dave (Hawaii) — I think I’ll always require login/registration. I have to. I’m sometimes away from the blog and even the Internet for several hours at a time, and with traffic increasing, I think there’s a better chance of being hit with comment spam.
Sean – thanks for the ideas there. I’ll keep an eye on those numbers for sure.
Hi Matt,
How effective were your modifications to your blog? Looking to make some additions to ours to reduce spammers and improve quality, but adding ‘dofollow’ seems like wouldn’t help the situation and would just cause more comments to moderate?
Appreciate your thoughts.
Mark
Mark – I no longer use the DoFollow plugin or any plugin like it. The blog got listed on several “do follow” directories and the spam went through the roof.