Sometimes Thanks Is Appropriate and Sometimes Not So Much

Posted on 04. Aug, 2008 by Anthony in Social Media

Useful WP Plugins

Learning is a pleasurable experience for me. I can spend hours searching and surfing the web in search of solutions to problems, ways to make the tools I work with run better, looking for new ways to improve our virtual tour service, or just finding out what the latest buzz is about out there in internet land.

The last day or two I’ve been looking into improving the experience here on this blog. In doing so I’ve been exploring some ways to combat the inevitable and quite frankly annoying comment spam that is sure to pester any blogger at one point or another. One type of spam I recently encountered was a short “Thanks!” comment that was associated with a non existing url with a questionable name. Basically, it appeared to be a form of spam in which someone leaves a short comment in order have their url linked to. Comments aren’t for spam they are for encouraging conversation…your welcome if you enjoyed a post, but please let’s make comments more relevant and beneficial to those who read them both blog owners and users alike.

It was great to find a new plugin today to help us in the battle against useless and unwelcome comment spam. The short comment spam solution proposed by ShoeMoney, an internet marketing professional and blogger, was built into a the Minimum Comment Length WordPress Plugin by Joost who regularly writes about SEO and Blogging and who is also the creator of the very useful social bookmarking plugin: Sociable which is currently in use here are Samurai Virtual Tours Blog.

The Minimum Comment Length plugin allows the blog owner to choose the minimum character length of a comment and returns a customizable error message to those commenting with messages that fall below the minimum determined character count. A great and simple idea to help eliminate some spam and encourage good, relevant, and beneficial conversation.

Tags: Anti-Spam, blogging, Comments, Plugin, Wordpress