Archive for the ‘L'sLinkyLove’ Category

L’s Linky Love: A DoFollow Plugin to Foil Human Comment Spammers!

Wednesday, July 25th, 2007

Are you a dofollow blogger? Are you tired of human comment spammers leaving insipid, irrelevant comments just to get link-juice? L’s Linky Love is the dofollow plugin for you!

What does the plugin actually do?

This is a variety of “dofollow” plugin. It’s main function is to strip “nofollow” tags from links in comments. The purpose is to encourage comments by rewarding commenters with “dofollow” links which boosts their rank in search engine. However, this particular plugin also has features that thwart human’s who are paid to visit blogs and leave insipid comments simply to boost their companies back links.

Here are the features:

  1. Encourages good comments: Dofollows are added to the author “name” and links in comment text after a commenter leaves some minimum number of comments. The blogger can set this minimum number to anything between 3 and 10. This encourages regular visitors to comment, but discourages spammers by forcing them to visit your blog many times before they get “dofollows”.
  2. Encourages links. Dofollows are added to trackbacks and pingbacks only after the blog author has left some minimum number of comments, trackbacks or pingbacks. This discourages scrapper sites from sending you spammy trackbacks but rewards real bloggers for linking you.
  3. Gives peace of mind. Dofollows will not be added to comments left more than 14 days after you published your most recent post. This is a safety feature that prevents your blog from becoming a link farm should you ever be unexpectedly absent from your blog due to illness or any other major life event.
  4. Thwarts overly aggressive SEO types. The blogger may refuse “dofollows” to “names” that contain too many characters. This can be used to avoid giving “dofollows” to commenters who claim their name is “cashmere dog sweater”.
  5. Gives you more control over dofollow / nofollow options. As is always the case, the blogger can also delete the comment, report the comment to Akismet or delete the name or url. That’s good for truly spammy comments. But with L’s Linky Love, you get another, less drastic, option. You manually prevent “dofollow” but still show the comment url and name by deleting the user email address when editing the comment. This lets you permit borderline visitors continue to comment, but deprive them of “dofollows” until they behave the way you like visitors to behave.

Get L’s Linky Love Plugin.

  1. Find the Admin Panel: Visit your Wordpress Admin panel find “Options” click. Click “L_LinkyLove” in the menu sub-bar. The admin panel will open.

     
  2. Customize: In the top box, enter the number of comments you want visitors to leave before the “author name” associated with their comment becomes “dofollow” in the top box. In the second box, ener the number of comments you want visitors to leave before the comments they drop in the content become “dofollow”. In the third box, enter the maxmum number of characters in a “name” you are willing to dofollow. Finally, decide if you want me to drop links in your blog.
  3. Click Submit. L’s Linky Love is now working!

Now for the big question:

Should you drop me links?

I bet you are trying to decide if you should give me links? Well, the links have several purposes. One is to get me zillions of links and propel me into the top ranks of money making bloggers. The more important reason is to inform valued commenters and spammers you are participating in Dofollow using my plugin rather than other plugins. My plugin makes it more difficult for human comment spammers to spam and it may discourage them from visiting your blog.

Currently, the plugin places a link just after single post; the text says
“Comments protected by L’s Linky Love.” Technically, this text appears outside the area where programs like PPP forbid links. However, to avoid the possibility that PayPerPost will ding you for links, you can limit display these informational links to older posts only be selecting: “Yes, but only on old posts”; older is defined as more than 180 days old. You can also exclude these links entirely.

What do I suggest you do? I think it’s useful to inform visitors about the plugin. So, I would suggest you select “yes” and display my links for a little while. Later, when you have time, create a “comment policy” page where you describe your comment policy; instead of showing my links, link to that. On that page, describe your policy and mention “L’s Linky Love”, posting the url of my plugin page. That will give me one link instead of zillions and also inform spammers and valued visitors of your comment policy.

Summary

Download L’s Linky Love. Use it. Tell people about it.

Finally, leave me comments and trackbacks and let me know how L’s LinkyLove works for you. And remember: I use this plugin. So, if you leave several comments, you’ll be dofollowed too!

L’s Linky Love: Update

Tuesday, July 24th, 2007

I made a few modifications to L Linky Love (LLL) in response to some conversation with Andy Beard and Anna of “For the Heck of it!”

  1. LLL now matches on the top level domain instead of the full url. Andy Beard noticed that I was not truncated urls to the top level domain when counting to give credit for visitors comments. I decided I should truncate.
  2. Long “names” can now be linked if the blogger wants to do so. LLL will permit the blogger to decide by entering a number in a box; the blogger will be able to enter any number greater than 15. I’ve set my thresh-hold to 35 characters at this blog, but have it set to 15 at the knitting blog. This should prevent my knitting blog from being inundated with comments from visitors with names like “discount sock yarn.”
  3. Names now match on the first words only. So “Andy Beard — extra descriptive stuff”, matches “Andy Wibbles”. That might seem not quite right. However, since I’m also checking email address and top level domain having all “Andy’s” match should be sufficient to thwart human comment spammers.
  4. Pingbacks are now “dofollowed” using the same comment count threshold as comments. Wordpress considers pingbacks comments, but I needed to code this explicitly because pingbacks don’t include email addresses and have unique “names”. (Even when the names are long, pingbacks will follow.)
  5. Bloggers can leave “nofollows” in until the visitor’s comment count reaches 10 matches. Tricia suggested this. I’d selected 7 rather arbitrarily and based on my blog comment levels. Tricia’s post very frequently, gets more comments and more spam, so she’d like 10. I’m reluctant to make it higher.
  6. LL lists the number of comments that “match” a visitor. I included this mostly to help me see what’s going on and I was planning to remove it. However, I rather like it now. Tell me if you hate the feature and I’ll deep six it.

The release is still due tomorrow. Thanks for the comments; I think the plugin will be more useful to the dofollow movement with these changes.

P.S. Thanks for some of the funny links. Tricia’s and Anna’s helped me realize I should match names on 1 word not 2, because if I’m dofollowing the long ‘Andy Beard’ link, consistency requires me to link Tricia’s and Anna’s.

P.S.S. Do start learning to leave the same email address every time! You’ll get follows sooner.

L Linky Love is now being tested!

Monday, July 23rd, 2007

L Linky Love Comment Plugin is coming soon! It is intended to be a “dofollow” plugin on steroids, giving bloggers the ability to grant “dofollows” to their community of visitors while making it very, very difficult for human spammers to get “dofollows”.

This comment plugin is intended to give “dofollow” bloggers better control of the follows they grant.

  • Gives “DoFollow” to the author link after a visitor has commented a number of times specified by blogger. I permit the blogger to select a number of times between 3 and 7. (Note: The match criteria is matching email, name and url. )

    In my opinion, the lower limit of 3 is the minimum sensible number to thwart spammers; I plan to use this value. Any choice above 7 isn’t really giving out “dofollow” links.

  • Gives “DoFollows” to links in comments after a visitor has commented the number of times specified by the blogger. I permit the blogger to select any number at all, and also never grant “DoFollows” to links in comment text.
  • Only gives 1 dofollow to an individual visitor per post. That is: if the visitor makes 20 comments on one post, at most only the first comment qualifies for “dofollow”. The match is tested on visitor email address, url and IP address.
  • Stops granting “dofollows” on comments made more than 14 days after the most recent post was published. This will prevent a blog from becoming a link farm if the blogger falls ill and is unable to delete or manage their blog.
  • Will not give “dofollows” to any commenter who enters a name with more than 20 characters. This prevents people ‘named’ “Las Vegas Real Estate” or “Cashmere Dog Sweaters” from getting “dofollows.”
  • Runs before NoOldSpamLinks. This permits NoOldSpamLinks to overide anythign done by this plugin.

Even with these features, I suspect human comment spammers will still try to get “dofollow” links. However, to do so, they will need to visit over and over and make reasonable thoughtful comments and basically behave like real honest to goodness blog visitors.

I’ll be visiting to checm my blogs to make sure the plugin actually does what I want it to do. If you are visiting, you may see your dofollows turning on or off as I periodically test the controls and check the blog display. Don’t worry; I will eventually stabilize.

I will probably release this on Wednesday. Meanwhile, my blog posts will be sort of boring!