Due to the birth of companies that provide human employees to post spam comments, many dofollow bloggers have been experiencing a lot of spammy comments. This is aggravating, and tempts many to abandon the dofollow movement.
I want to continue to give “dofollow” links to visitors who leave thoughtful comments and participate in conversations at my blog. I don’t want to grant “dofollows” to people who visit, leave truly stupid comments and drop irrelevant links in comments
For this reason, this morning I spent some time rigging up a “proto-plugin” that should to the following:
- Generally, grants “dofollow” to comments after a blog visitor leaves their fourth comment with matching email addresses, urls and author names. Once a visitor qualifies, the dofollows are applied retroactively.
- Exception: If a commenter left a name that is longer than 17 characters, they aren’t getting a dofollow on that name ever.
I’ll explain my reasoning for these choices on Wednesday when I have the first “real” version of this plugin available. (It will have a a user interface that lets individual bloggers tweak some choices. )
Meanwhile, if you are not a spammer and left a few comments earlier don’t worry about having lost your “dofollow”. Once you leave four comments, you comments will “follow”.
Oh… and let me know if you have any suggestions for plugin features. If I am aware of them, they are easy to code and don’t waste loads of CPU, I may include them!
Can’t wait to see what you’ve cooked up in the code-voodoo kitchen.