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:
- You must be registered and logged in when commenting to turn your name into a link to your Web site.
- 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:
- 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.
- You must use either your name or your nickname. Absolutely no “keyword” type names will be tolerated.
- 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.
Very good idea, but i think you will have a bit of problems with spammers =0S
Well, I’ve already got problems with Spammers, so since I’m already keeping an eye on all the comments I don’t think this change is going to make much difference.
I think it’s a generous thing to do. I wouldn’t worry too much about spammers, especially if you use Akismet. And having to register and login should be enough to discourage most of the system-gamers.
Spammers are usually readily dealt with WP.
Peter, you’ll be amazed to the extent spammer will go, no matter what you do, you still have to keep an eye and read all the comments in the end
Yes, you’re right. But, I’ve been impressed so far with tools like Akismet that do a great job in intercepting *most* spam.
I can’t tell you how many spam comments Akismet has gotten on my blog. Specially if you post with the tag p*rn. Its like they flock there. Anyway love you site, have been reading since you first got dugg.
I agree with dngloz… but this is a good thing… u’ll have more commenters hehehe!
but Akismet won’t be able to detect human spammers…
Well having top commenters in the site is cool idea. Yes, you will have problems with spammers as dngloz said. I have a new born blog about Open source and I used to find 2-5 comments that does not make any sense.
JimShoe: i hate Akismet since it assumes that large number of comments spam :(.
I notice that several of your comments are getting stuck in Akismet and I’m having to go in and periodically approve them. It is possible that if you are commenting on another blog somewhere they could be marking the comments as spam if you are using the same URL that you’ve been using here.
Most bloggers are starting to crack down on anyone using what appear to be commercial URLs or names that look like keywords, and they are doing this by marking them as spam in Akismet. This causes the effect to cascade across ALL blogs and not just their own. I also believe this is going to be a movement that gains momentum as time goes forward.
On a somewhat related note, did you get my e-mail I sent a couple of days ago about this topic?
John