Tag: comments

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Royal Pingdom:

Go ahead, look through your comment spam. You’ll feel great. Here are people (uh, bots) who really understand you. There will be an abundance of comments mentioning how brilliant, fascinating, intelligent and just plain old great you and your blog posts are.

This has quickly become one of the most prevalent forms of comment spam, because pandering to the ego works. People will reach into their Spam queue and pull these comments back after Akismet flags them as spam automatically, then defend them as legitimate commenters—including replying to them.

And who can blame them? So many blogs rarely receive comments, so when one comes in that not only appears to be genuine, but actually praises the blogger, it’s hard for people to say no.

Want to make a blogger’s day? Leave a comment when you read something you like. (Real ones, not spam ones.)

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Douglas Crets for ReadWriteWeb:

Disqus is quietly testing an interface that allows site owners to rank and give credentials and labels to their commenters. The feature takes advantage of a trend towards being able to find experts through social search.

[…]

The commenting features mimic those already used internally by bigger publishers, who evaluate a user’s influence by assigning badges to confirm to the network and community some measure of a commenter’s significance.

Put simply, it’s gamifying comments, but there are some interesting criteria you can set up, and it’s nice that the site owner gets to weight the various “point” systems:

 

This brings comments a step closer to the kinds of systems you see in discussion forums.

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I’ve just managed to switch my commenting system from the standard WordPress system to IntenseDebate as a little bit of a testing platform. It’s a very interesting idea—and one also shared by Disqus, which is a system I looked at for a while and never implemented—for standardizing comments and helping blogs to network together even while on different hosts.

I’m interested to see how it works, but you can already see it in action here. Please feel free to leave a comment on the post of your choosing to both experience it for yourself and assist me in taking a look and seeing how it works from the admin side.

If all goes well, I plan on recommending IntenseDebate to anyone I know and/or assist with a WordPress self-hosted blog.