Some of you may have noticed that earlier today I added a feature in the sidebar that displays the top commenters. There are two little catches to this new feature:

  1. You must be registered and logged in when commenting to turn your name into a link to your Web site.
  2. You must enter your Web site address in your user profile in order for the link to work.

There is one very special thing about this new feature. The outbound links are normal ones which convey full search engine benefits. People often pay a couple hundred dollars a month to get a link to their site from a site as highly ranked as this one, so I guess you could say that it literally pays to be active here!

Why would I do this? Well, I want to encourage and reward visitors who inspire me with commentary and help turn OMB into a real user community. I don’t just put up new content to hear myself talk… I really enjoy feedback and truly appreciate my loyal readers. In fact this is just the first of several ways I’ll be kicking off in the near future to give back to the community…

I only ask a few things:

  1. You must use a personal URL when you register. Links to commercial sites will be ruthlessly removed. The point of the commenters list is so that we can get to know who YOU are. Not to be used for commercial SEO.
  2. You must use either your name or your nickname. Absolutely no “keyword” type names will be tolerated.
  3. Don’t try to game the system. If I get the feeling that someone is leaving a bunch of comments just to try to drive up the numbers I will take immediate action ranging from deleting posts to banning. It only takes about 10 seconds to remove people permanently from showing up on this list, so please don’t abuse the privilege or all your time and energy will have been wasted.

The list reflects the most frequent commenters in the past 30 days. This will ensure that the most currently active commenters will always be listed and ensure that everyone has an equal chance at being listed over time.

If you want to leave comments but don’t want your name to link to a URL, it’s no problem! Just don’t put a URL in your profile and that will take care of it! Or, if you don’t log in that will take care of it as well. :-)

EDIT: We are having a lot of problems lately with people posting comments on the blog with commercial URLs. This is absolutely not going to be tolerated. If someone makes several posts in a row with a commercial URL please expect them to be deleted in their entirety. It takes way too long to edit the URL out of every one of them.

Folks, the bottom line here is that the many thousands (or tens of thousands some days) of people that read this blog every day often read the comments and actually do click on people’s names to check out who they are, but no one wants to end up on a site that looks like an advertisement!

Commercial URLs in comments are a form of SPAM (Comment Spam), and they add no value to the conversation on my site. In addition, I know about services like Buy Blog Comments which pay people to do this – and I despise it as the scourge of the Internet.

PS – Here is why I can’t take the time to contact everyone.

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