I made a few modifications to Lucia’s Linky Love (LLL) in response to some conversation with Andy Beard and Anna of “For the Heck of it!”
- 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. Now, as far as LLL is concerned the urls “thedietdiary.com” and “thedietdairy.com/blog” match.
- 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.”
- 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.
- 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.)
- 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.
- 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.
Glad I could help with some question/suggestions and funny link names.
I don’t mind being your guinea pig - especially since you’ve been making plugins pretty much whenever I say “this could be better” or “we need something like this”. LOL
Thanks for changing the # of comments option to 10. I know I could have always edited it. I’m sure a lot of people will use a lower level and I might too, but it’s nice to be able to put it higher if my spammers don’t get the message.
I think I also like the number of comments that match the visitor (is this a database call?), who knows it might give people more incentive to comment more often when perhaps they see that others have left more comments than they have.
Good work.
Finding the number of comments that “match” a visitor involves a database call that goes through the entire comments database, looks for all the comments that “match” and counts. I make that call to decide whether or not to give dofollows. Once I have the number, I can just display it without making any more calls.
About databased calls: Linky Love did the “counting” database call twice for each comment that displays in a post. First when creating the html surrounding “the name” (so Tricia in your case). Then again when creating the text. Worse, the database call was written in a way that itself made an unnecessary database call to find out the email of the person who commented. (This value is stored by Wordpress once it fishes out the comment and it already has done so.)
So, Linky Love did 4 database calls per comment!
I reorganized and stored some values. This lets LLL do the same logic making only 1 database call per comment at most. (It actually makes fewer some times. When real conversations occur, some people comment more than once. In that case, LLL remembers them and skips the database call)