Commenter’s…Giving Something Back
Feb 16th, 2007 by Kirk M
While sitting at home dealing (once again) with another disability type flare up, I decided to bang around in my WP Admin and see to some daily cleaning in the back end of things. You know—Getting rid of “Spamments” checking the approved comments (Spam Karma 2) and glancing over the WP news on the Dashboard and there I found an item I’ve been meaning to check on for awhile now. What the heck. Since I’m stuck at home until the flare up finally dies down to a slow burn, I might as well work the blog a bit as I feel up to it so I headed off to do a little research and started with this. The item was from Dougal Cambell’s Geek Ramblings and this particular post was about adding in a plugin that could be configured to remove the rel=”nofollow” tag for comments posted to the blog (that WP throughs in) after a set number of days. The number of days option was just in case a spam comment actually made it through the spam filters such as Akismet and Spam Karma 2. Here’s and excerpt from Dougal’s post:
Two years ago today, we released WordPress version 1.5. This was a pretty major release that introduced several new features that are still major staples of the current 2.1 branch: the Dashboard, Themes, and Pages. It also added a minor new change which was mildly controversial to some: comments were automatically flagged with the ‘nofollow’ attribute.
And later goes on to say:
These days, many sites have better anti-spam measure in place. Akismet has been very effective, and many WordPress users swear by Spam Karma 2. With measures like these in place, hardly any spams ever make it through to be displayed on your blog. And if they do, hopefully you delete them pretty quickly after they appear. So, that’s even better than just telling search engines not to index their links. They can’t index something that they never see in the first place, right?
I recommend giving the his entire article a read through but the basic gist comes down to the point that if you believe that spam is well controlled on your blog then this is a safe way to give something back to those readers who comment regularly. So in an effort to show those who have taken the time to comment on my small but really good looking corner of blogdom I have installed Kimmo Suominen’s dofollow plugin and set the number of days before the rel=”nofollow” tag is removed from the comments to 2 days just in case I’m not able to get to the computer for some reason. So here’s a way to say thank you for the comments you have left and thanks to Dougal Cambell who took the time to give something back to his commenters and taking the time to let other’s know as well.
Technorati tags: comments, links, spam filters WP plugins
[...] one little plugin will do. Back on Febuary 16th of this year I posted about finding a small plugin by Kimmo Suominen called the dofollow plugin that removed the no [...]
I have been using the Akismet plugin to control spam comments and it has been working pretty well. Occasionally some legit comment might get mislabled, but try I check the spam section about once a day so it’s not that bad.
Akismet and Spam karma work well together and if the Akismet service ever goes down, Spam karma will take up the slack. Since I’ve been using both (recently started using SK2 again after a brief absence), it’s a rare occasion that any spam slips through.