I finally managed to take the time and add Gravatar support to Altitis. So if you want to have an image appear next to your name when you comment, hope over to gravatar.com, sign up and add a little picture of your choice. Note that this is tied to the e-mail addy you use when commenting.
On a related matter, let me briefly talk about the NoFollowFree Plugin, which I’m using here as well.
The No Follow attribute is basically a switch you can assign to hyperlinks which was initially added to help combat comment spam. What it does, in practice, is prevent Google and MSN from indexing any URLs added in comment sections.
This is pretty much a given on many blogging platforms nowadays - default behaviour on WordPress for instance, fixed setting on Blogger. But the thing is, keeping a discussion alive between several blogs is part of what makes up a blogging conversation, at least in my eyes. Using a blanket No Follow goes against this philosophy - if you comment and refer to your blog, your blog forms a generic background to your comment, the broader context of the conversation. And doubly so, of course, when you link to a more elaborate answer from a comment.
No Follow is a crutch which actually breaks conversation in terms of search engine indexation (not to mention that Yahoo and Ask don’t honour it anyway, and in practice Google follows it but doesn’t count the link), and there are other, better tools to combat spam available anyway.
I’ve implemented the NoFollowFree Plugin about a month ago. What it does is selectively remove the No Follow attribute from commenters based on a certain set of rules, among which a threshold on the amount of comments you posted. What threshold? This is something I’m not telling. Just do know that commenting will now tie your blog into the conversation in terms of search engine management for the returning visitors.
What effect did adding this plugin have? Well, user registrations have increased massively since I activated the plugin, since there’s an option to set a different threshold for registered users. Most of them appeared bogus, though, so I’ve closed site registrations and kicked them. If you were a legitimate (and human) reader, my apologies. If you have a technically valid reason to be a registered user on Altitis, drop me a mail.
My Akismet stats have exploded, but at the same time, Patch 2.4 brought several thousand visitors looking for damage meter information to the blog, so there might be a relation between both. At any rate, there has been one single spam which made it through the filters since I activated the plugin. Which means the experience is mature enough for me to keep it alive, and talk about it. And that’s now a done thing.
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Tags: Blog, Blogger, Damage Meters, patch 2.4, spam, WordPressYou can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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