Lucia’s 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.
Andy, I agree that some “names” are information is good. I’m pretty much setting this up for “on the balance”.
Lucky for visitors, the link you included is still live and shows! So, they can follow it. However, it’s no follow.
I could “match” by email addresses, but the problem as I see it is that spammers can easily discover most people’s email addresses and enter them. (I don’t want to set up a “special” on just to enter in comments at blogs!)
Spammers are fairly well motivated, so I figure they will want to do that!
Since I do want trusted people to be able to give “follows” to specific links, I provided for that in the comment text instead of the “name”. You will discover is that if a “trusted person” puts the No Follow Links in the comment itself, the link will follow.
They way I plan to set my setting, picked the settings, if you visit 3 times, leaving your usual name, usual url and usual email address, then you can drop any links in the comments you like along with descriptive text. I think that’s more common than changing “name” in the comments box.
(Note: As I write this particular comment, I’m not sure if I’m trusted when I enter a comment when I log in. As admin, I don’t have the normal little “name,url,email” box. So, I don’t quite know how things are stored!)
Come look. The link is now followed.
But, if you do have suggestions, now is a good time to make them. There are a three ideas I thought about and discarded. Two were hellashiously difficult, so I didn’t do them. One would be easy, but I’m not sure it’s worth the cpu.
(Oh.. and now I’m going to verify what happens if I include the link twice Dofollow plugins. This time, it should not follow. I need to decide if that’s what I really want to do.)
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…
Anna I do it on specific occasions where a link is highly relevant and specific to the conversation.
Deep links to relevant information are much more valuable for people reading comments, the person whose site you leave the comment on, and for your own website.
I have used links like
Andy Beard on Deep Linking
Andy Beard on Linking Structure
Sure, the link could be left in the main body of the comment, but then that is using up 2 links rather than one
Lucia what you could do is just include a manual override.
There is a plugin that add nofollow to specific links:
nofollow case by case plugin
You could do the opposite - if someone adds /followthis to the end of a link, it will be followed
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Note: I edited Andy’s link so it wouldn’t break my layout.
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.
I wouldn’t manually edit Andy’s specific link. I can tell it contains good content and isn’t specifically SEO.
I was planning manual overide for a later version. But I want the default to be not linking names with over 20 characters because right now, I’m getting way, way more “cashmere dog sweater” and “reliable mobile phones” than I’m getting good long “names”.
Plans for the later version include an additional editing page for comments that would let me see 1) how many comments “match” a visitors comment and 2) let me mass edit a “matching” visitors comments- including sending them off to akismet if I got fooled.
I will be editing Andy’s long link because the long link does cause disruption.
Hmmm… I need a method to let my comment links be followed!
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.
I see both Anna and Andy’s point of view. Since I also have a knitting blog, I particularly understand Anna’s point about just wanting the default to not link things like “cashmere dog sweater” at the knitting blog but not minding so much on this blog.
The only “solution” to this was to decide you were both right. I created an option box. Bloggers can select a threshold for the length of the name. On this blog, I’m setting it to 35, which makes Andy’s example comment “follow”. On my knitting blog, I’ll use the minimum value I permit, which is 15 characters. Knitting bloggers are just not going to use Andy’s trick, so I think this will work for me, likely Anna and many other bloggers.
(I’ve actually gone in and added a domain to my admin user name. We’ll see my comments on my own blog start to follow! )
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.
@Tricia Plugin Hog detector is here. It makes a big ugly table in your footer which will help you find obvious hogs.
I can let the threshold be 3-10 instead of 3-7. I also plan to eventually make a sort of “deeper” admin panel that will let us mass edit people who are getting follows for precisely the reason you describe. Some spammers leave a few good links and then get worse over time. I know I’d like to be able to see all the comments by a certain person and mass edit them. But I think what I have is a start and ready for release.
There are three options on the interface. Those are easy to modify. Other options require editing code, which I think most people are loath to do!
Morocco Travel just irks me. Strangely, I wouldn’t mind so much if they wrote Joe of Morrocco Travel. It’s not “conversational” when people don’t include some sort of name and I often edit those names and if the comment is even borderline spammy, I send it to Akismet.
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
@anna,
I don’t consider discussions of what is or is not spam in comments derailing a thread on this topic.
I’m actually thrilled at the whole conversation for a number of reasons. One of the is that I find the most difficult part of writing a plugin to be deciding what the features should be!
You, Andy and Tricia have all expressed different points of view with regard to what’s appropriate in “name”. Every view has it’s merits. I lean toward seriously disliking Morrocco travel as a “name”. If he or she takes to posting at my blogs, he will not get a follow.
By the way: When Lucia’s Linky Love is running, the mildest method of “disciplining” spammers is to strip out the email address. I don’t give “dofollows” unless the email address field contains information. However, if both the name and email address exist, the name will still get linked.
Obviously, you can also delete the url,name full comment or report to Akismet. I do a variety of things depending on how much I hate the comment.
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.
@Tricia: With the new plugin, you can still edit out the url. However, if you just edit the email adress, what should happen is that link won’t dofollow. It also won’t count toward the number that visitor needs to start getting “dofollows”
So those visitors can leave a link and it displays, but the link won’t get followed.
That means editing out the email address is an option to spank people who are just a little bit spammy. It’s sort of “slap on the wrist” option.
Like you, I have a range of responses. I’ll admit I can also be erratic. But people who drop entirely unnecessary SEO links in the text get sent to Akismet.
I also visit the links. I’m less severe on bloggers who sell advertising than on businesses who sell products and services. If the blogger uses a dofollow link, I will never report their comment to Akismet. After all, I can leave a link in their comment and get a dofollo too!
(Though I might delete the email and not follow if they are truly obnoxious. But then I won’t drop my link either because that would be just ridiculous.)