If there is anything you want to be proud of when building your own website, it should be having readers to drop in and say ‘hello’, interact with you through the comment boxes. How else would you have known that what you have written are being read?
Whilst it is good to receive regular comments, it is even better if the readers come forward to show themselves using real names and engaging comments. Yet, ‘legitimate comments’ can be stuffed with keywords in the Name column for their website (some smart SEO guru told them that’s how it’s done). Others may drop their signature link (s) in the comment itself. This makes it difficult for you to moderate, and previously you just had to live with it.
So Gobala Krishnan has come up with a neat wordpress plugin that allows you to display your comment policy that helps your readers self-moderate their own comments.
This is a great tool. And if you have a wordpress blog, you would know that AKISMET just will not work anymore in terms of capturing SPAM messages. There are people out there who have learned the trick of the “backlink” trade. Nowadays, the disguise is so cleverly written, you don’t even think you need to delete that comment until you discover the names are different, the emails stay the same but the url has not changed.
Recently, I sent an email to a reader whose comment I have approved. It was a ‘gmail’ account; google sent back a message saying suspended. Whoa!
You can read about how to activate and set the comment policy plugin or download at wordpress.og.
Blogcatalog
September 2nd, 2009 8:24 am
Ugh, I liked! So clear and positively.
Pett
September 2nd, 2009 10:00 am
Hello Pett, I am pleased to meet you.
September 5th, 2009 5:34 am
По-моему, у Вас украли эту статью и поместили на другом сайте. Я её уже видела.
September 7th, 2009 6:53 am
[...] recent comment on my last post on Comment Policy Plugin For Wordpress was written in Russian: По-моему, у Вас украли эту статью и [...]
September 7th, 2009 6:56 am
I am not even sure Floost is your real name, but the benefit of the doubt, I can call you that. Since I do not read Russian, I have to translate your comment and it actually says, “I think you stole this article and placed on another site. I had already seen.”
I certainly do not need to clarify why I posted the article as this is my homepage. Yet, comments like these bug me because it makes me wonder if readers can ’smell’ if posts have been plagarised, stolen or re-edited? I am feeling quite glad actually that you have made that comment. Otherwise I would not have been able to update this site this week because I have nothing to ramble or share with the world. Now I have. Here’s the post. to address your ‘concerns’.
October 18th, 2009 2:54 am
[...] I did try using comment policy but it did not keep the bots or robots from creeping in on the comment posts. It turns out not [...]