Various Things = Paying Way More Attention To Comments

April 11th, 2007

A combination of events both internal and external leads me to write this post.

1. About a week ago, I disabled the Bad Behavior plugin because it was blocking Technorati and Megite.
2. I recently reiterated on Essential Keystrokes that I removed NoFollow on the comment links (I’ll be adding this cool graphic from Randa Clay Design shortly). I did this a while back.
3. There’s been some talk about disabling anon comments and having some kind of Blogger’s Code of Conduct which I disagree with.

What were the results of these three actions?

1. I’ve seen a huge increase in attempted comment spam. I recently moved past 4,500 spam comments blocked by Akismet.
2. Having NoFollow, while encouraging comments, obviously makes this blog a bigger target for comment spammers.
3. I updated my comments policy on my About Page slightly.

What this all means is I’m spending a lot more time personally moderating comments, especially trackback spam. As part of comment moderation, I’ve decided I need to visit each and every commenter’s website or blog personally. If I find nothing but a splog, I will delete the trackback or comment. I don’t think an inbound link from a splog deserves a reciprocal link from this blog. Especially since I removed NoFollow.

Therefore:

• If a comment is coming from a human being, 99% of the time I’ll leave the comment in place even if it’s critical of me or makes points I disagree with. I’m not into deleting comments by real people who have worthy, well thought out things to say. And as a way of saying thanks for commenting, you get a link out of it.
• But… when it comes to spam, splogs, and flog comments including trackbacks from sites where the source blog is just covered with ads and content stolen from other blogs, I’m deleting said comment or trackback.
• And as for anonymous comments, well, if you don’t leave a link back to an originating site, then there’s really no point of deleting said comment and this whole linking to spammy splog thing is a non-issue.

I hope this is a fair balance between being as open as I possibly can to real people, and as hard on spam as possible. Obviously, this comment moderation and battle with spam won’t affect any of the regular readers, anon comments, or links to legitimate websites.

I think in the end this blog will have better comment quality and ultimately, everyone who links to and from here will benefit as there won’t be spam blogs linked to from here.