When I recently searched for a spam plugin to replace Akismet, I found a rather amusing assortment of spam on a lot of the plugin authors' websites. At first, I took this as an indication their spam plugins totally sucked. Then I realized it was that they don't recognize certain types of spam when they see them. (Which probably means their plugin doesn't recognize it either, ... [Read More]
Wordpress
WordPress theming: getting comment_form into your theme
Wordpress 3.0 has a new php call: comment_form. It's awesome in that it replaces about half the code in a typical theme's comments.php file. But it's not in most legacy themes, and the way to add it to your theme is not so obvious. Also, it's nerve-wracking to customize because there's no HTML to edit, no place where you can simply insert your little disclaimer or change a ... [Read More]
Making commenters work for you: beyond deleting and modding
The previous articles in this series talked about going beyond a simple anti-spam approach to comment moderation and actually moderating comments so as to shape comment threads into valuable web pages. If you're convinced you need to do more than eliminate spam and hate speech, read on. Beyond "spam" and "delete" If you don't want to post a comment you see in your moderation ... [Read More]
Making commenters work for you: the comment policy
We talked the other day about how you don't have to let your commenters run your site. You have the right to go beyond spam-prevention and moderate so that comment threads become a vital part of your website. There's a temptation for webmasters to think of their commenters as their audience. The fallacy is that there are quite a few readers who don't comment ("lurkers") to ... [Read More]
Making commenters work for you: going beyond simple moderation
Most webmasters - particularly those from the U.S.A. - think about moderating blog comments in terms of only spam prevention and censoring especially ugly language or hate speech. They think it would be censorship to moderate someone's ideas, even if those ideas are subtly toxic. But as a blog grows, suddenly the webmaster is outnumbered by the commenters, and their voice can ... [Read More]
