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!
This looks great & I can’t wait to use it, I’m getting kind of sick of las vegas real estate comments, but I still want to be a do-follower. What were his parents thinking when they named him that?
Now I am going to abuse you plugin in a very legitimate way with a relevant link that has relevant anchor text
We will see if you are truncating the URL to the root domain.
Now if I just signed my name, a reader wouldn’t know that the link was to a resource they would be interested in.
If I just left the descriptive anchor text, they wouldn’t know it was from me, and thus possibly trusted.
Now whilst there is not a lot of people linking in this way from comments, I don’t feel it should be given a penalty.
If Andy Beard left a comment like that on my blog I’d edit the spam out of the name field and leave his name intact… that is, if I didn’t delete the comment entirely (as I sometimes do)… but that’s probably just me…
That link demonstrates one of the reasons I do it, as it takes additional time to add anchor text manually, and on many themes long URLs cause some disruption.
Andy, I think it depends on the focus of the blog and my irritation stemmed from the way people are using the Do-follow Blogroll to go around spamming every blog on it with “relevant” comments…
If someone left a name (like your example) on my “For the Heck of It!” blog I’d edit the name or delete it. “For the Heck of It!” is my personal blog where I rant about general everyday life, my mother-in-law, talk about my cats and other general chit chat. I don’t want spam there in any way, shape or form. (I get plenty)
If someone left a name as per your example on my Bloggers for Dollars I wouldn’t blink an eye. I would consider it appropriate and I’d click the link myself because I’m always looking for more information on my blog focus.
I hope this makes my position a little clearer. I have people leaving “good” comments at “For the Heck of It” and leaving their name as “DoggieTShirts” or “JewishTshirts” or “Real Estate blah blah” or “Morocco Travel” (this guy is a daily visitor) and I did not think this was appropriate in the least regardless of how “good” their comment was. And then they had the gall to argue with me about it, heh. Real jerks I tell ya.
Anna - I quite understand that
Whilst I was added to the Dlist that was passed around, I didn’t promote it, and deliberately didn’t get included on the dofollow blogrolls.
The way you can use a list of blogs is just that, work your way down the list and hope to find something interesting to comment on.
The community I created on Bumpzee is a litle different. It is much more casual and intended to allow you to find like minded bloggers writing about subjects that interest you.
I hope it encourages more real conversations.
The times I leave deep links and especially with some indication of anchor text are to help me not have to repeat myself too much.
Great I’m glad to see that this is almost finished.
How is the plugin doing on the resource usage issues?
After my experience with my former web host over the weekend I’m not 100% convinced that I hadn’t already fixed any resource issue that I might have had. I think they played me a bit. Still I only want plugins that aren’t hogs.
I suppose if we don’t like the default settings on your plugins we could always edit the plugin ourselves right? I mean if we want to alter it above or below what the default settings are via the plugin admin interface?
My regular visitors often leave comments on two or more posts a day since I usually make more than one blog post a day on many of my sites. I would prefer the option of becoming do follow to be at least 10 comments rather than seven. I would also want this because I’ve let a few of the comment spammers slip by before they started coming around daily so I wouldn’t be surprised if they are close to 7 comments by now too.
Anna Realestate and Morroco Travel come by my sites regularly but they leave decent comments. I don’t have a problem with them at all and do not really consider them comment spammers although I wish they’d use their names occasionally.
Morocco Travel irks me, even though his comments are “relevant”. I have asked him politely to please use a name instead of his business name but he continues to use Morocco Travel and is a regular commenter at “For the Heck of It!” now.
It is tedious to continually edit the name field of his comments and I’ve deleted a few comments.
Tricia, I know some you don’t consider what he is doing to be spam but I do. (Spam is unsolicited advertising and that is what he is doing.) Except for the name thing he seems to be a nice guy but it isn’t nice to disregard my request to use a name in the name field. conversation with him
I really don’t want to ban him but I don’t want to have to deal with him as much as I’ve had to lately either. He is persistent and has been doing this several times for over a month!
Oops, I’ve derailed the thread. again. heh
My overall preference for my commenters if for them to leave a name when they comment. I reply to a good number of my comments and it feels weird to reply to something other than a name. I don’t mind site names occasional - especially if I also happen to know the persons name … but business names are are not as well liked.
I visit my commenters sites. If it’s a blog - an active one, I’ll usually let their comment go through if it’s relevant.
I tend to edit out links from those that I think are abusing my site for SEO purposes for their business. It’s good to know that with your new plugin that I should really be editing out their email address.
I had a commenter the other day that was leaving links within their comment. I think it was for a Canadian flower delivery company so when they left their comment they linked words like Canada, Canadian, Rose, flower etc to their link. That’s the worst kind of comment spam. That person got marked as a spammer for that and is probably on Akismets list now since they hit half our sites that way!
As I said I usually visit the commenters site to see what it is. that gives me a good idea how I’ll respond to their comment and link(s). So yes, I handle comments in a variety of ways - editing, deleting or marking as spam. It all depends.