Combat DoFollow spammers using this WordPress Plugin
Whatever side of the NoFollow / DoFollow debate you’re on, I’m sure you’ll be against spammers and junk commenters.
I removed ‘rel=nofollow’ from my comments quite a while ago now, but only today did I realise that I’ve been using the wrong Plugin for the job. The way I had it, all comment links weren’t followed by search engines until they’d been on my site for 24 hours. This was to give me time to delete any dubious, spam-like ones that slipped through the net.
However, this doesn’t combat those commenters who trawl the lists of DoFollow blogs, leaving one comment on each then disappearing, never to be seen again. If their comment appeared legitimate, they’d get their followed link with choice of anchor text after 24 hours.
That isn’t what I want.
I’d been using the DoFollow Plugin from Kimmo Suominen. It does the job, but the only thing you can easily customise is how long it takes before a link turns DoFollow.
A much more effective method is to use the LinkLove Plugin, which allows you to set the number of comments an individual must make before they achieve DoFollow status.
UPDATE: 04 February 2008
Please read this comment I left on WPDesigner.com, which highlights how the LinkLove plugin uses a lot of resources to run. I have since uninstalled the plugin.
The default number of comments before DoFollow is activated is 10, but this is very easy to customise. Jamie, at Edinburgh Computer Services, has his set to (7). I’ve chosen to set mine to (5). It’s much more effort for someone only out for self-gain to leave 5 comments, than it is 1, but the regulars amongst you won’t be affected, because most of you have kindly left at least 5 comments already.
In his ultimate list of DoFollow and NoFollow Plugins, Andy Beard had this to say about the LinkLove Plugin:
One thing I like is that the detection is based upon email address and not domain or URL, so it allows a commenter to spread the links how they like.
In other words, if you have more than one website that you’d like to receive some Google juice for, this Plugin won’t punish you for switching the URL you enter in the comment form. As long as you use the same email address it’s all good.
Have your say
I was going to follow Jamie and set my comment number to (7), but then I read that Ben Yoskovitz, entrepreneur, set his to (2), and Wendy Piersall, online marketing entrepreneur, suggested that 2–3 would be more appropriate. Wendy has since removed DoFollow from her blog, but that doesn’t, in any way, affect the respect I have for her opinion.
Do you think I’ve set the number of comments too high (5)?
Other blogs writing relevant content:
- Chris at SuccessCREEations (business blogging) advises us to consider carefully what name you use to comment.
- Chris at Solo Technology (technology blog) published an article back in June about the potential for abusing DoFollow.
Related posts on David Airey dot com
66 appreciated comments on “Combat DoFollow spammers using this WordPress Plugin”
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“Do you think I’ve set the number of comments too high (5)?”
That depends… how many times have I commented so far?
;)
Hey David, thanks for the link :-)
Of all the plugins I experimented with, I think you’ve picked the best one. I did the same progression you have (before I ultimately gave up) and Link Love seemed to have the best approach.
I was dabbling with repeat comment counts between 2 and 4. Wouldn’t ya know it, I had folks making whatever number of comments it took to clear the nofollow flag?!? Lol, and that’s for a link from a PR5 blog. Sheesh.
In hindsight, I think I should’ve been somewhere between 6 and 10. I’ll be curious to hear if you stick with 5 or nudge it up after a few weeks.
Great stuff David
5 isn’t too high at all !
PS. Thanks for coming over to my blog and commenting, pretty cool when you said you get 70-80 emails every day! I appreciate the time you took out
Good comments are good comments, regardless of being the first comment somebody has left, the fifth one or 100+ comments. If you get a good quality comment who cares if the person ever comes back? Yeah, I know, build community, build community. Maybe it’s better to think smaller and just think: “build discussion, one thread at a time.”
Community can evolve over time without trying to force it at every turn.
If a reader/commenter is adding relevance to your page and that’s not worth giving that person a linkback I don’t know what is. I wonder if the DoFollow group is going to fracture into groups of different types of DoFollow enabled? Who is using X plugin versus Y, what site is requiring X number of comments, etc.
I don’t know how many comments I’ve left here, this might be my first and could sound like sour grapes, but the reality is that If you have another topic that interests me or we are suddenly in a conversation (something I’m more interested in engaging in than a one off comment), I’ll be back to leave another. And another. But I’m not going to search around your blog to reach some comment quota just to have links DoFollowed.
Bottom line, if you take out the trash and make thought provoking posts that inspire comments this will encourage others to leave better comments (and more comments than one) than “first” and selfish comments only looking for a link.
There are plenty of reasons others like to leave comments besides or primarily only to get a link back.
Just my 2 1/2 rusted pennies.
I think Lucia discovered a couple of problems with LinkLove which is the reason she decided to write her Lucia’s Linky Love plugin.
The original Link Love is PHP5 only and also uses more CPU resources than it possibly could.
5 seems on the high side, but is perhaps a nice moderate number given that the default is 10. I think for your blog, which seems to get a lot of comments, 5 is good. Where as I use the Semiologic DoFollow plugin, which removes nofollow without condition. I don’t get nearly as many comments as you do, so it seems appropriate to let any one be followed – SK2 has done a great job stopping all the spam, so I’m not worried about that.
Kelly,
I can’t honestly say, but thanks for the Facebook message.
Chris,
You’re very welcome for the mention. Thanks for stopping by. It’s interesting to read that you gave up. Whether a site has removed nofollow or not, doesn’t determine if I comment, so whilst it’s not a real big deal, I still find it interesting to follow the debate.
Jonk,
No problem at all.
TDavid,
I think you’ve misread my feelings on the matter. If someone leaves just one comment on my site, one that adds to the discussion, then of course that’s fantastic, and I’m very grateful.
If it happens to be their first, then yep, they won’t get a link back, but they will get me to visit their blog and check out a few of their pages. If they’ve published something of interest I’m more than happy to add to the discussion on their blog.
What’s funny is that some people will go searching around to see how many comments they must leave before their links are followed, no matter how much we disagree with it.
Your 2 1/2 rusted pennies are much appreciated.
Andy,
Thanks for the tip. The update looks great.
Kristarella,
Interesting to know about SK2. The only spam Plugin I use is Akismet, and I get around 200 spam comment per day. I’ve wondered about adding extra spam protection, to see if I can reduce this number. It becomes tiresome checking to see if any legitimate comments have been caught in the Akismet net.
Thanks everyone.
This is a great idea. I’m getting fed up with the hit and run commenters as well, it’s generally pretty easy to tell who they are but it’s still frustrating – I’m going to install it soon. Thanks for pointing it out.
LinkLove is my choice for no-nofollow too, I’ll set mine to 3. I’d like to set it to 7 too (to suit my site name) but I think that’s a bit too high.
For your blog, I think 5 is ok.
Btw, is this the first time I’ve commented on this blog? I’m always a silent reader lol.
David – I’m glad you like the idea of LinkLove, its a fantastic way of combating hit and run comments.
I was going to write my own plugin had I not found LinkLove.
Maybe 7 is too high, I never had any feedback so left it as that. Maybe I will change my to 5 as well.
Jamie
Thanks for the SEO link!
Ben,
I’m glad I read Jamie’s article yesterday. Even though this plugin has been around for a while, I wasn’t familiar with it. Installation and customisation is very simple.
Nice,
I’m not sure if you’ve commented before. Your avatar reminds me of one I’ve seen in the past, so quite possibly. Regardless, thanks for reading, and for your thoughts here.
Jamie,
You’re very welcome for the link. Thanks for writing about this plugin in the first place. I think it’s an improvement on what I had been using.
David, I really appreciate learning about this plugin…yet again, reading your blog has served up useful information!
It also made me sigh. I can’t help but wonder what new trick spammers will develop to overcome the new barriers we put up to support our welcome visitors and keep out the riff raff. There are some days it feels like a really bad use of my time to spend energy staying ahead of a very small and very annoying set of obnoxious visitors…knowing I’ll have to do it again and again and again.
I don’t know… I think that if the comment is real you should follow it even if it’s the user first post. Any number of comment can be done by an auto made tool so it won’t even work…
It can be frustrating to sift through spam to find legitimate comments. I found a bit of tweaking SK2′s settings has meant I very rarely have to worry about it. I haven’t used Akismet, but it’s popular so I guess it must be doing a good job. :)
I feel the removing of “nofollow” from regular readers comments is very important to the future of blogs.
Yes its a good way to encourage more comments on your blog, feedback etc. But like my business I want my clients to do well, expand, open more offices etc, its more business for Terinea.
The same can apply for your blog. Wouldn’t you like your community of readers blogs to grow in terms of subscriptions, PageRank, Alexa and Technorati rank? If you have an relationship with them the chances are you will also benefit.
Robert Scoble was talking earlier in the week about “Social Network Search Engines”, future of search maybe? If anyone understands how Techmeme works you will understand what I mean by this. Using a clever nofollow plugin will allow Google to become Techmeme.
“Always remember, the art of good business (blogging) is being a good middleman”
Michael Gambon – Layer Cake
Jamie
I hadn’t actually thought about this tbh. I just installed a DoFollow plugin, and figured that was it.
I’m really glad you wrote about this now, because what you’ve said makes complete sense. Leaving one comment on a blog is fine, but leaving a few comments shows that you’re actually participating. I think I’ll swap to this plugin as well.
As for the number, I think I’ll set it to 2 or 3. I think that most people who are out for the linkbacks will find a blog, comment, then leave. If they then come back, at all, that’s good enough for me. In most cases, it would indicate they’re more interested.
(Though on a blog as popular as this, where you make conversation so easy, a higher number would be easily justifiable as well tbh. :) )
Tammy,
It’s my pleasure that you learn something of interest here, and I appreciate you letting me know about it. We all like to read when we do something right. The spammers will always find a way around the barriers we build. Sadly it’s part and parcel of publishing a blog. If you look for the positives, spam only becomes more of a problem when the discussion builds in size and value.
Jew,
I find that quick bursts of messages from the same email (bot) are swallowed up by the Akismet plugin, so I don’t have the problem you mention – thankfully.
Kristarella,
That’s a surprise that you haven’t used Akismet, considering it comes as standard with WordPress. Did you just decide not to activate the plugin and find another? Interesting stuff.
Jamie,
Nice Layer Cake quote. I enjoyed that movie. I’m not entirely sure how Techmeme works, but that’s a pretty big statement about Google and nofollow, so I’ll find some time to check it out.
Michael,
That’s great you see the value that I did. Swapping over took just a couple of minutes.
I’m happy you think I make conversation easy! I was thinking about that when setting the design of my blog – things like white space, type size, comment visibility etc. I think I can improve it further, but great that you think I’m doing okay.
I guess that it’s included with WP is more evidence that it’s good!
I started using Spam Karma 2 before Akismet was included in WP releases. It works so I stuck with it. :)
p.s. Do you know why my old gravatar is being shown? Does MyBlogLog have some kind of caching for avatars?
David, Great Post and thanks for the mention!
This whole discussion reminds me of my time in the Navy back in the cold war.
One side would develop a missile system. The other would come up with an electronic counter measure to defeat it. Then the first would build an electronic counter-counter measure to defeat that.
It was a never ending cycle of one-up-manship.
I think we’re faced with the same thing here when we try to rely exclusively on automated systems to deal with this particular problem, which in reality is a somewhat sophisticated spammer.
Automated responses do a good job dealing with the machine spammers. Akismet is great with these. (I’m currently beta testing Defensio and it seems to be doing a good job as well so far.)
When it comes to human written spam comments, I don’t think anything will do a better job filtering them out than each of us blog owners keeping a close eye on our own comments. No matter what plugin we use, some of the bad guys will figure out a work around to exploit.
David, I actually meant that you as a person make conversation easy. It’s never just a stream of comments here, you reply to everyone, which allows for conversations (A lot of popular bloggers don’t take the time to do that).
But now that you mention the design, I do like it. By the time the comments begin, the sidebars have stopped and the background is pure white. There is nothing to distract you from the comments. You then improve that further by using only a faint grey separator. Once again, no distractions.
And the typography is much nicer than on my blog at any rate! It’s something I need to find a way of fixing…
David:
I don’t think 5 is too high at all. At 5 comments on any forum you would still be ranked very much a “noob”!
Too bad all of these precautions are necessary, but I don’t think any one would argue that they aren’t justified.
This is a good information, David. I will use the plugin since I was using a normal dofollow plugin, I have seen some people who just stop by and comment one “Hey good post” and never coming back again. They just get the benefit and throw me away in the dark.
I hope, with the plugin that you have stated above will prevent benefit ripping from my blog. Thanks!
Kristarella,
I think the MyAvatars plugin shows Gravatars too, so it might not have anything to do with MyBlogLog. You look happy though!
Chris,
My pleasure mentioning you. I fully agree that the best method is to use your own common sense, and thanks for the comparison to your time in the navy. Very fitting.
Michael,
Oh I see! Well, I guess that’s even better then! Thanks buddy.
Justin,
Funny you should mention forums, because I’m still such a noob on Digital Point that only today have I been able to add a signature! Thanks for leaving your thoughts on the plugin settings.
Ken,
I know exactly what you mean, and I’m glad you found the info of use. I hope it works out for you.
David – thank you for the response. I guess part of what turned me off in your post was this:
“However, this doesn’t combat those commenters who trawl the lists of DoFollow blogs, leaving one comment on each then disappearing, never to be seen again.”
The way I see it is the DoFollow list is bringing you additional traffic. If these people leave you relevant, good quality comments — regardless of their motives — they are helping to make your page better. By having a quota to employ DoFollow, you and any others that use this plugin are essentially creating a system where commenters are not treated equal from day one. You are making those with more comments more relevant to the search engines, regardless if their comments are trash.
Let’s say you are writing about a company and the CEO stops by to respond personally to your post. With your system you are telling the search engines not to follow the CEO’s link(s). You’re telling the SE that the CEO’s personal response to what you’ve written isn’t important enough to follow. In a sense, you are breaking the conversation.
It’s my understanding from talking to Matt Cutts and reading others that NoFollow wasn’t intended to block these types of votes, these types of links, it was intended to be for unmoderated, user-submitted links. Like where there are no controls for what users put in there. Lately it seems have been expanded to cover text link ads, which I find confusing (another topic, another day). I mean, if you do business with an advertiser, like their product, aren’t you voting for it from your website? The use of NoFollow there seems wrong.
I understand the need to curb spam. We all have those concerns, but there are better ways if that is the goal that do not tell the SE something is less important than you and other human readers thinks is important. It’s a vote and one that you should still consider — even with the plugin employed — to use on a case by case basis.
Now back to my “trawling” of the DoFollow list ;)
Roughly How Techmeme Works
It started off with 1000 of the top tech blogs, if more than five other tech blogs linked to one post within that community it would get on the frontpage. Blogs with more authority have more influence on which ones appear on the frontpage. Often called a fabric, i.e. network of related blogs.
No Follow Plugin and Google understanding relationships
Now think about this in terms of Google, nofollow plugin and your reading community David. Your blog is authority in all things related to graphical design, so are some of your regular readers such as Tara and Randa Clay. You probably all respect each others opinion on design matters through the relationship you have built up. But Google doesn’t understand this relationship of trust (or fabric), but it does understand links.
Hence why I think the removal of nofollow from regular commenters is good thing for blogs in general.
Hope this makes sense?
Jamie (now only 5 comments for my blog!)
That’s pretty nifty. I haven’t received any spam or what I would consider junk comments yet so I guess it’s not essential, but I would love it if ExpressionEngine would do this very same thing. With EE right now, it’s either dofollow or nofollow…no dofollow after three comments or whatever.
The SEO world is a competitive one and I applaud you for taking steps to authenticate your endorsed link content. I deal with tons of forum spam from imaginary email addresses and created a CAPTCHA to attempt to differentiate humans from bots. It’s helped a lot but I’m still getting spam links anyway.
I can kind of see what TDavid says above but at the same time I think use of NOFOLLOW comes down to your motivations for the site. I think that having the quota probably encourages a greater sense of community whereas not having the quota probably increases noise-to-signal ratio of comments, per TD’s comment.
I don’t see any problem with rewarding your regular site participants with DOFOLLOW links.
Topical authority is important, but as others have noted, people interested in graphic design tend to congregate on graphic design blogs, those interested in seo on seo blogs etc.
There is some cross-over, but that is healthy too, and the community on Bumpzee does allow you to browse tags a little, though probably not as much as I would like in the future.
Great conversation. I just switched from the standard ‘do-follow’ to Lucia’s Linky Love — I like the options it gives, although I’m being pretty lenient.
Also, you mentioned the spam situation you’re in using just Akismet… I’d recommend Bad Behavior. It knocks out a lot before they even tie up your system resources. I’ve also added Spam Karma 2, although it can be buggy, I’m finding. I’m still trying to find the best mix of settings on it, since it has knocked out a couple legitimate friend’s posts so far when at its tougher setting levels.
Anyhoo, thanks again for bringing this up (I had no idea there was anything aside from the typical do-follow plugin before this.)
I’m looking at having my husband install a dofollow plugin once he has a little free time, so this is a very handy discussion. Thanks for giving me more info to work with in choosing one!
I am for the do-follow plugin but the tool you made mention off could be something, for now I will keep the Kimmo Suominen plugin but for future I may use the LinkLove one…
Thanks for the article :)
I also use the link love plugin and set it to 3. 5 seems a little high to me, but to each his own really. What works for one doesn’t work for all!
TDavid,
You’re very welcome for the response. It’s always refreshing to get a difference of opinion here.
You say that I’m giving those people who leave more comments extra relevance to search engines, even if their comments are trash, but I moderate every comment I receive to get rid of the trash (at least I give it a good shot).
If people leave me relevant, good quality comments, then like I said, I’ll visit their website and browse a few of their pages, so if they choose only to leave one single comment, at least I’ve given them the attention they deserve and perhaps a few comments. What’s more valuable? A single link in my blog comments amongst tens of others, or my time? I reckon my time.
Jamie,
Thanks very much for the lesson and for taking the time. It’d be interesting to see the results if Google was to integrate a similar fabric.
Deron,
It’s a very similar system to the forums at Digital Point, whereby you need to participate a certain amount before you can add a signature with followed links. I can see the value.
Andy,
You’ve done a great job with the BUMPzee community, and I’m looking forward to your own community offering once you get it up and running.
Adam,
Thanks very much for the spam recommendation. I’ll check out Bad Behavior – anything to cut the spam numbers will be a blessing. Glad to provide some info of use too. Cheers.
Heather,
It’s really simple to install, and if you want any help with it I’m happy to offer advice.
Jermayn,
You’re very welcome buddy.
Sara,
Thanks for stopping by, and interesting to know your preference on the settings. I just realised I wasn’t subscribed to your blog. That’s changed now.
Hey David,
I’ve been using Lucias plugin since Andy first mentioned it, and it’s definitely the best and fairest option IMHO. I think the number of comments to trigger is fine: Mine is lower than yours, but greater than 1 and since first installing the plugin I’ve not mentioned it since, but it’s done what I wanted it to do.
I understand what you mean by trawling the DoFollow list: of course there’s nothing wrong with going through the list finding new blogs & commenting, that’s the point of the list after all. But when you see the same commenter leaving ‘nice post’ on 50 separate blogs you have to question their motives, and contribution.
On the spam front, Akismet, Bad Behavior and TanTan’s simple spam filter reduced my spam queue from 400 a day to 4. The last one is the key!
David – with all due respect, it’s not about what you or any other human readers are doing with a nofollowed link that I’m talking about. It is what you and anybody else with the same/similar setup is telling the search engines to do.
It’s a mechanical vote that is not being exercised in terms a machine currently understands. There is no way to tell the search engines selectively: hey, this is a great comment, follow the link from the person who left it — I took some of my valuable time and followed it — but because this person has left less than X comments, I chose not to use a link so you are instructed to do the same.
Sure, it’s great that you are following and doing what you say you’re doing, as well as hoping others are doing the same, but you’re telling the machines do the exact opposite — don’t follow this link, it’s not important, I’m not voting for it. NoFollow isn’t about human beings, it’s about machines. Please reread the example in my last comment carefully.
You are thinking about the people who are already here but seem to be forgetting about the people who aren’t here ;) What is the value of one link among a bunch of links on your pages, you ask? To the search engines every link is of value (to a certain maximum on each page which Google at least has said to keep at 100 links or less per page) unless you explicitly tell them to ignore.
I’ll leave you with this to ponder because I don’t want to be argumentative about the subject. if we knew each other better, I’d keep trying ;)
Going to add this plugin to my page.
As far as your question on “How many posts before links turn DoFollow?” I think that 5 is a very good number to have. The regular commenter’s on your page will be rewarded this way.
Hi David,
Thanks for the pointer to the new plugins. BTW still no trackback. Probably thru google yes, but I believe technorati is not picking it up anymore.
Five comments doesn’t sound high at all, it’s a number of comments which easily can be made on a blog by returning a couple of times and coming across some interesting posts. I don’t think it should really form an issue for anybody the way it’s set now.
Chris,
Thanks for the spam plugin recommendations buddy. Much appreciated.
TDavid,
Thanks again for your comments. It’s fair to say we disagree on the subject, and I’ll continue with this LinkLove plugin for now. Good of you to put your thoughts across though.
DT,
Perhaps you’re onto something there. Technorati stats can be nice to look at, but they’re not all that important for what I want to achieve. By the way, sorry I’ve not had a chance to work on the WordPress theme. Things have been pretty hectic of late.
Slevi,
Thanks for commenting. I appreciate it.
You have me coming out of lurk mode for this one. I usually follow through RSS feed. I really enjoy reading what you have to say and how you interact with your readers. Thanks for mentioning the plugin. I have been having more than my fair share of people that are commenting just to leave a comment, and often it does not add to the conversation. I just installed this on my main website and will be installing it on the others. Removing the DoFollow from my sidebar has cut down on some of those types of comments, but recently I’ve noticed it has increased. I’m not sure why?
Thanks again!
Hi Opal,
Yep, I know you’re a subscriber, and it’s much appreciated.
It’s great you found this post of use, and I hope the plugin helps cut down on the spam. It most likely won’t affect the number of spam comments, but instead will help prevent you leaking page rank to unsuitable sites.
Thanks for refering me to the LinkLove Plugin. I use a similar system on my crude built-in-10-minutes ‘blog’ and had been mentioing that to other people. I will be able to tell them about this plugin in future.
I have my nofollow removed after 3 comments, the original three posts retaining their nofollow status unless I say otherwise. I also have the ability to put any comment to nofollow or dofollow. So if someone comes along for the first time and seems to be posting a genuine comment I can just whack in on to dofollow or if someone just posts a load of ‘great post’ comments I can just nofollow them.
Hi david,
Not a problem, I have been having server problems as well, so I had no time to work on the project.
I know how you feel about technorati, and I feel the same as well.
With the do follow movement, I refrained from putting up the logo badge, as it encourages all kinds of posts, so the best is not to openly advertise is. Perhaps instead post the “top commenter” plugin instead.
Hi David. I haven’t visited here in quite a while, so I guess it is time to look around again and comment.
Setting the do-follow to 5 or 10 or whatever is up to you, of course, but I think 5 is way to high – 2 or 3 is plenty I feel, 5 is pushing it and 10 is a bit rude. People commenting 2 or 3 times are likely to be return visitors so why not reward them rather than wait for more comments.
Can I ask if there is also a time limit as well – meaning 5 posts per month or is it 5 without any time limit? Just wondering how it works, not that it really worries me as I only have the free wordpress blog so can’t do any of this plugin stuff.
….detection is based upon email address and not domain or URL, so it allows a commenter to spread the links how they like…
Thats a nice thing as I have noticed it is not always the case going by other blogs.
cheers,
David,
That’s a nice option to remove nofollow from any comment you like. I wouldn’t know how to without modifying the plugin somehow.
DT,
I like to keep my sidebars as un-cluttered as possible, so will go without the top commenters plugin. It’s not one I’m all that keen on personally.
Hi goldcoaster,
Been a while, yeah, and thanks for leaving your thoughts. There’s no time limit on the comment number, whether you left 4 comments a year ago, and one today, that’s no problem. You’ve already left loads here!
I’m always interested in seeing what plugins the more popular do follow blogs are using. It helps me to decide and plan what to do in the future. As a small and relatively uncommented blog, I don’t have a problem with following links from one time commenters, but I know a different system will be in order once my site’s popularity increases. Here’s to helping the little guy plan ahead!
I have never seen WordPress because I have a strong aversion to using any packages that i’ve not built.
WP must be very flexiable if it were to allow you to remove nofollow at will becuse i would imagine it doesn’t come with a default column in the comments table for specifying whether nofollow is on or off. I guess since your plugin allows you to turn nofollow of after x posts it must add a dolumn to the db. So it should be pretty easy for someone with a little php knowledge to fix up a similar facility for WP.
P.S. I just checked out your portfolio. I didn’t know that there were any good designers in the UK. Most are 10 years behing the yanks and the eastern europeans. I imagine you know what I mean.
Nope. :-)
WordPress supports plugins which are little (ok, not always so little!) bits of code that are run as “hooks” on actions or filters.
In this case you more or less trade-off modifying database tables w/ a bit of extra IO counting comments as they’re retrieved.
If curious, the Writing a Plugin article might be interesting. Savvy PHP developers can have a lot of fun extending WordPress.
Thanks for the tip, David. I have switched to this plugin and set the requisite number of comments to “2″.
I thought about using do follow a while back, but then pulled out. This encourages me to actually use it.
Thanks for all the great comments. I appreciate your visits and thoughts.
Thanks to the LinkLove plugin, I myself got some 1 post commenters because of the dofollow, I hope with this, they have to give an effort.
thanks for letting me know about this plugin, will have to play with it.
This is a great way to combat DoFollow spam! The only problem, I think, is that spammers will not take the time to read that I am using this plugin. They won’t get any link love, but I’ll still have to deal with their comments.
David,
Thanks for the heads up on this plugin.
My newest blog will officially launch next month and I think I will stick to a standard 5 comment rule as well.
How much time do you spend with your blog moderating comments? I would think that to filter out the spam you are spending a bit of time per day
hmm … sounds interesting …
i’m gonna check that out … as spam is giving me hell for months now …
especially comment spams and trackback spams …
thanks for the share … appreciate it …
A. Taylor,
I don’t spend any longer than a couple of minutes per day checking the spam filter. If it got to 10 or 15 minutes I’d have to change something, because that’s too long.
Thanks everyone for commenting.
two thumbs up on plugin description; too bad that it isn’t available for blogspot hosted blog. But i do have some wordpress blog too, so i will implemented the linlove plugin. For the 5 comment threshold, well i think it is fair enough… Good Luck with your design job and your blog
Nugroho Adi Pratama’s last blog post..Maybank plans expansion on Indonesia
Hello Nugroho,
Have you thought about switching to WordPress? I’ve not actually used Blogspot, but have heard of its limitations.
actually i come to blogosphere firstly on blogspot, and it is like a landlord – tenant relationship, once you get comfort it is very hard for you to switch to other landlord. Yes i’m agree with you that blogspot has limitation espescially on it’s design flexibility. About WP, yes it’s been bugging my minds lately, i like what WP based blogger could do with their blog. I also has fear that Indonesian Governement will ban blogspot (well, they ban multiply and myspace).
Nugroho Adi Pratama’s last blog post..Maybank plans expansion on Indonesia
The control in Indonesia is very tight, and I’m aware that YouTube is also banned by Indonesian ISPs.
What are your thoughts on this?
The ban was happen because of Fitna movie, have you watch this movie? Actually before this movie show up, the control was quite loose, but this movie content has angered our president that he demand a ban on any website showing this movie. I will discuss this on my blog once i get the chance (maybe tonight/appx. 7 hour from now); i have scan my gmail inbox and find there are people suffer financial loss due to the ban since they sell things through Multiply. But i think i require further research on the topics.
I think this ban was precedented by several country in Asia like China and Vietnam (if i’m not mistaken). Governments become aware that they able to put censor on our connection.
Well in my personal opinion the ban wasn’t quite right, it’s like there is something wrong with your hand and the solution is cutting the whole arm; people does have advantage on Youtube, there is a teacher having her teaching material from Youtube.
Nugroho Adi Pratama’s last blog post..Maybank plans expansion on Indonesia
I’ve not seen Fitna, but a quick search tells me it’s anti-Koran. People should be allowed to formulate their own opinions, so I also don’t agree with a ban.
Hello just thought i will let you know i had a issue with your blog appearing frozen also. Must be monkeys in the system.
Hi David,
My blog is only a month old so I don’t get many comments but have a few. Is this plugin something for me? Like others have said, if someone only visits once and leaves a great comment why should they not receive the benefit of a link? I am a newbie and am trying to figure this out but am a bit confused about it.
Thanks,
Hi Cindy, since publishing my initial thoughts, I’ve changed my opinion, and now I advise against using the plugin. It attracted too many spammers, who left three, five, or seven, spam comments in very quick succession in the hope of gaining backlinks.