Cool new comment system on Blogstorm
Some of you might have noticed a few changes with how we handle comments on Blogstorm and I wanted to explain things in a bit more detail. I will discuss the features first and the reason behind the changes at the end of the post.
In short when you leave a comment we now allow you to add a link to your profiles on sites such as Digg, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit & StumbleUpon as well as a link to your website.
The big change is that we now only allow registered users to leave links – if you don’t register you can still leave a comment but you can’t add a link. See below for a screenshot of how the new system looks:
You will notice the “More comments by” link at the bottom of the comment – this leads to your personal profile page with a live link to your website and other social network profile pages. To see an example check out Zoe Piper’s profile.
Once you have registered using the registration form you have access to a profile page which allows you to edit your details at any time.
The registration form allows you to add your Twitter & Facebook details – the rest of your information can be added once you log in. We use Gravatars to power the photos next to the comments – Gravatar is a free system and you can sign up here.
Why we are changing
The main reason behind this change is to encourage conversation – we want intelligent comments from regular readers and the best way to do this is to create a feeling of community behind the site.
My feeling is that if you read and comment on a blog on a regular basis then registering once is actually easier than typing your details every time you want to leave a comment.
In addition we are very aware of the fact that a blog post with hundreds of incoming links and hundreds of nofollow blog comments could be a very inefficient PageRank black hole and forcing users to register is likely to dramatically improve the signal to noise ratio of comments here on Blogstorm.
We won’t be going down the route of letting people leave dofollow comments despite the fact we offer live links from profile pages. It only needs one bad link to slip through the net and a popular blog post could be given a ranking penalty and that isn’t a risk we want to take.
Please try the system out – your feedback is appreciated.
Post category: Blogstorm Tweet
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
Read the 30 comments below, or add your own!
Its great. Registration on the blog simplifies the process of commenting; in fact, you can just concentrate on your comment part rather than putting in other details, such as username and email.
The addition of social networking links gives a boost to your traffic and SEO campaigns and this is a welcome addition. Cool changes, in my opinion.
Let me be the first to congratulate you on this system, its a great way for users to add exposure to the items that they want, and getting links to our social media pages.
Im not totally sure that it will improve the signal to noise ratio, but its a great idea nonetheless!
Somewhere else to landgrab our usernames … Perhaps I should have gone for SEO London instead …
I think this is a very good system , since you don’t fill in details every time you want to leave a comment I think this will increase the number of good comments
Also, Patrick, I entered my URL as http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk in the profile field (ie with HTTP) but on my profile page it says my website address is http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/users/www.malcolmcoles.co.uk …
Hi Malcolm – I fixed it. Something strange with WordPress auto adding http:// into the profile field but not letting that be added back into the database.
One extra thing you probably notice is that poor title tags on the profile pages – we are working on a fix for those.
There aren’t many blogs that I’d register with, but this one is pretty decent so I’ll register!
Have you any plans to implement a system like HoboWeb where you get a dofollow link after you’ve earned some trust – after X number of posts?
I’ve just implemented it on my blog and I’m hoping that I’ll catch any spammy links before they’ve posted more than X posts. Having said that, your blog gets more traffic so perhaps it’s an overhead you don’t want?
I prefer to give dofollow links from profile pages rather than comments. Some popular posts have hundreds of comments and there is a good chance that at any one time at least one will be a bad link.
Any comment link can turn from a decent link to a spam link at any time – all it needs is a domain to expire or a site to get hacked and all traffic could stop coming to a blog post within hours. If that post has 150 comments then how could I figure out which was the bad link in order to fix things?
Excellent comment system. I really like the integration with Twitter and Facebook!
I don’t like the whole ‘register to leave a comment’ thingy. WordPress already has that feature by default, but no one uses it. Maybe one day I will register to leave a comment, for now, it’s okay like this.
Patrick,
That’s a very good point – something I hadn’t thought about.
Hmm, perhaps the new dofollow plugins from Shaun and Dave Naylor etc need to switch links off completely after 60 days or 90 days to get around that problem.
It says “Registration is free, takes about 5 seconds and is worth doing” but then says “Please check your e-mail” after taking multiple attempts to meet all the constraints on the registration form which it only tells you about if you fail to satisfy them. Way more than 5 seconds. Why is this worth doing?
Please get with the cool kids and use OpenID instead.
Thanks for the feedback, I will make the form clearer. You don’t actually need to wait for the email by the way – I will remove that part.
Nice integration with social networks but where’s the link to the profile pages?
The link to your profile page is right under your comment. We are having issues with spaces in usernames at the minute but that will be fixed soon.
Great idea Patrick. Is this a standard feature in WordPress, a plugin or a custom job?
Hi Patrick – pretty cool
Anybody that passes link juice to another site should obviously be keeping an eye on things. I run a lot of blogs. I’ve only seen one instance of a site being removed from Google and that was cause it had been hacked and serving malware.
While linking to a bad neighbourhood is a concern, I think it’s well blown out of proportion. Sitewide links to a ropey site might be another matter – but I’ve never seen the odd link to a ropey site get a site de-indexed (unless it was hacked).
NO site can say it doesnt link to a bad neighbourhood, or we’d all stop linking to anybody. I link to about 4,000 pages last time I checked (!) – it’s impossible to keep track.
Maybe you’ve had different experience, but linking to bad neighbourhoods is Google FUD (unless they’re serving malware) as far as I can make out. And I can see why they promote it.
I see SO MANY sites with porn spam etc – sites are still in Google.
BUT now that I’m flowing juice, I’ll be even more heavily moderating things before they even get published. The link juice if for my regulars and intelligent interesting folk. I’ll be aggressively outing idiots too – might even do a weekly post with all their email addresses lol.
I’d add I’ve been using linky love for nearly 2 years now (I think) with no probs.
I don’t like the whole register to leave a comment either.
But on this site it appeared to be very simple – as was simple and quick.
The thing that made me register is that I was being asked to provide my facebook, twitter and flickr accounts. This is quite novel for me to see this on a blog site.
I may adopt this procedure for my blog, it makes sense.
This is very cool but I just found an issue. Take a look at the profile page it created for me: http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/users/Brian%20Hancock
It has no real information on that page other than that I apparently joined the site on December 31st, 1969… =)
Whoa! Using me as an example. I don’t know if that is good or bad. Either way thanks for the publicity.
Oh and by the way. I agree that registered commenters are preferred.
Really good idea to incorporate the social networking element into the commenting function.
Have you had a surge in spam comments, or has the registration process acted as the gatekeeper to stop the spammers?
I’ve read through the discussion above – but is this a WordPress plug in you’re using? I’d like to try it out on my site.
testing your new comment system
Great Guys
@Brian – yes we are working on a fix for that……
One of the few quality sites that I am happy to register for.
just want to test the comment system…
when i leave a comment, the page will refresh?
Yeah! It’s really cool new comment system here. It’s really great. Thanks for sharing.
I think it’s a good system. you use this much?