Search Engine Land has upgraded the comments system today, bringing
deeper integration with Sphinn.
Looking over the new system got me thinking about how blogs handle
comments and what the best practices might be.
If your blog is well respected and has thousands of subscribers it is
probably acceptable to implement some sort of registration system. For
smaller bloggers who need all the comments they can get, this isn’t
really a viable option.
Some blogs such as SEOmoz encourage registration by offering
incentives such as tools, avatars and profile pages with links to
registered users but this is probably too advanced for the average
blogger.
On BlogStorm we use a custom coded AJAX comment form which allows
readers to post comments quickly and easily (I hope) without leaving
the page. So far out of the 1100 or so comments we have received
about 20 have been spam. All comments are moderated so these 20 were
removed before anybody saw them.
With about 10 comments per day and a spam rating of 2% its pretty
easy to manage the comments on this blog. Bearing in mind even the
busiest blogs have less than 100 comments per day I really can’t see
how spam becomes so much of a problem.
For anybody using Wordpress there are simple file name changes that
can virtually eliminate spam and custom plugins using JavaScript will
remove the rest.
Don’t let spam dictate how you run your blog, its not your readers
fault that people abuse your comment forms so don’t punish them.
Note: this isn’t a negative post about the new SEL comment system, I
think the new Sphinn integration will provide value once the bugs are
ironed out (I wish the system didn’t use a frame). Sphinn already has a very good signal to noise ratio so
pulling comments from there will undoubtedly be good for SEL.
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