.A blog comment is a nice reward for a blogger. (hint)

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Advantages of Blog Comments

.Instant Feedback – A comment is an instant form of positive or negative feedback. When they are positive it just feels good and builds self-confidence.  Negative comments, if given in a constructive way help you to learn new things and improve yourself.

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Add Personal Touch– Comments are a way of adding a personal touch to something that is generally impersonal (the internet)

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Negatives About Blog Comments

Blog for Comments

Blog Comments - Sorting Through the Spam

Needle in a haystack – Comments can become a thorn in your side when you start receiving too many spam comments and are unable to figure out which ones are real and which are not.

Can you identify the fakes?

I’ve posted some of the comments from today.  Take a look and see if you can tell which ones are real and which are fake.

Note: The article title “Learn to Love Again” is an experiment.   The vague title is supposed to provoke thought and capture readers attention. Did it work?  If so make a note of it. 🙂

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Methods of Minimizing Spam Blog Comments.

Require Comment Moderation

This helps reduce spam comments, but it puts the burden on the blogger to review each and every blog comment and decide which are spam and which are not.  This is useful until the number of comments per day becomes unmanageable.

Askimet WordPress Plug-In

What is it?

A WordPress plug-in that automatically reviews comments and approves them if they are real, or marks them as spam for human review.

How does it work?

When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your site it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down.

Askimet seem very confident about their ability to find spam however I have had numerous occasions where it marked legitimate comments as spam so I am reluctant to delete thousands of my spam comments without reviewing them.

Here is a screen shot from Askimet plug-in.  I resized it down a lot so it doesn’t look as pretty as it does in real life.

Askimet Blog Comment Plugin

Askimet Blog Comment Plugin


Which of these comments would you approve, if any?

Askimet has flagged them all as spam, however I am not confident enough to delete all of my thousands of comments without reviewing them. How would you feel if you made a comment on my site and it was deleted?  If I am not 100% confident in Askimet then in my mind it isn’t much better than the manual method because I still need to review each and every single comment!

Are all of these spam?   Can you spot the real one?

Blogging for Money

Which Comments are Fake? Real?


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Summary  –  Blog Comments Are Still Greatly Appreciated!


I hope this has been useful to you.  I’ve shared how comments can be very rewarding to the blogger.  I’ve also pointed out some of the challenges a blogger deals with in regards to dealing with comments.  I hope that this helps you understand why comments are usually moderated and why it might take time for your comments to show up on blogs, or possibly not show up at all

We took a look at Askimet, a WordPress plug-in helps manage blog comments and locate spam comments.    I’ve also tried implementing a new method learned about writing article titles that provoke thought.

Sincerely,
Rich Bianco
(aka DisplacedGuy)

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