Comments on: Your comment is special, have a star

By: mlankton

mlankton — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 15:16:11 +0000

Here is one thing I haven’t seen discussed. We all rely on akismet to help us keep spam comments off our pages. My sarcastic sense of humor got the better of me when commenting on a blog last week, and there must have been something in my comment that made akismet hold it. The blog owner probably hit delete all comments held by akismet without looking at them (bad idea, akismet is great, but it sometimes holds good comments). I was added to the akismet blacklist. I was lucky, and found out about it within 24 hours of it happening, and the good folks at akismet removed me and apologized. How many comments did I make on blogs that got deleted because I was briefly on akismet’s blacklist? I don’t know, I’m just glad I found it quick instead of commenting for a month before I figured it out.

By: Bree DoFollow

Bree DoFollow — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 03:19:10 +0000

Put my vote in for dofollow, I do-follow links now on my Aussie housewife blog. After a long time procrastinating I have seen the importance of dofollow and using the “do follow” principal to help keep the Internet better connected. http://www.reallyreally.net – Take a look at my dofollow blog and feel free to comment. Thank you, Regards Bree.

By: Bape

Bape — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 03:18:24 +0000

Its ironic that many bloggers talk about this but then they actually use no follow.

By: Hobo Design

Hobo Design — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 05:19:18 +0000

Nice idea. Where can it be downloaded though?

By: ClappingTrees

ClappingTrees — Wed, 23 May 2007 05:34:02 +0000

Hey Tony, where is the download page for this plugin?

By: morganusvitus

morganusvitus — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 14:10:49 +0000

The site looks great ! Thanks for all your help ( past, present and future !)

By: Emily

Emily — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 06:42:16 +0000

I think the star thing is really cute!
(Sorry for making all your work sound so… cute)

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 21:07:39 +0000

Including the blacklist functionality, and having the ability to set the number of posts for whitelisting to zero would be extremely useful.

How does your star system handle nofollow on trackbacks?

That is another important feature of the dofollow plugins, and gets me lots of links

By: Tony

Tony — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 21:02:51 +0000

Thx for all that info Andy.

You are absolutely right, this is micromanaging of links. Though I think this might be combined with the whitelist idea, where a number of stared comments will promote the comment author to a distinguished contributor status with automated dofollow. Yieks, that’s more development work, but sounds like a pretty cool feature to have.

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 20:35:07 +0000

Thanks for the mention engtech

I am happy to include the plugin in my list as soon as you feel it is ready, especially considering I just gained a link because engtech’s post earned a star.

This plugin does seem a little like micromanaging the links, and that would be hard work on blogs which receive a lot of comments.

What would be useful and I have seen people express a need for such a plugin is a universal whitelist / blacklist plugin, which would filter posts and comments with a high priority and force the links to be either nofollow or dofollow for certain domains.

That would allow you to whitelist every comment from a trusted commented, and blacklist domains you choose, such as the popular Wikipedia nofollow plugin.

On another note, I use a comments policy to handle junk comments and manual comment spam – some gets through regardless.

You are running subscribe to comments – the spam will hit people’s email box with blue pills comments possibly originating from your domain.

People are so worried about a little thing like whether a spammer gets a link for a couple of hours, when they should be looking into safeguarding their business from being shut down by a host or domain registrar.

I used the link box to a way of improving your legal position, it is fairly simple.

To counteract the SEO, you should add a few more related posts to the single pages, and possible add some tagging with UTW or Simple Tags

On my blog it doesn’t matter how many comments I get, I still retain a lot of the link juice on a single popular post and spread it out. It still leaves by external links, but it is more even in distribution.