bradenslen
bradenslen
Like: On the Care and Feeding of Your Favorite Blogger ramblinggit.com
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bradenslen
bradenslen

@vasta Those are all good points. They never crossed my mind when reading the post so I'm glad you pointed them out.

There is something that bloggers need to do too: keep their blogs open. I see a lot of blogs with either no comment form or comments turned off (I presume after a certain time period.) Also a lot of bloggers turn off pingbacks and trackbacks. That was sound conventional wisdom perhaps 6 years or more ago to prevent spam but today's antispam plugins do a fine job of keeping the spammers at bay and these should really be kept open. I mean, a blogger can't really complain about not getting feedback if they have no comments enabled.

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Ron
Ron

@bradenslen @vasta I also wondered whether they were really bloggers at all. Or were they SEO entrepreneurs who were no longer making good money with the keywords they had chosen and had to go get a regular job to make a living?

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In reply to
bradenslen
bradenslen

@vasta @Ron What amazes me is how good things like Akismet and Antispambee have gotten. I established a couple of self hosted WP sites back in about 2008 and keeping spam under control was a real chore back then. Today not so much.

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pauljacobson
pauljacobson

@bradenslen Akismet has been pretty good for a while. I haven't really thought about it much (probably the idea), but now that I do ... I don't remember the last time I had to manually mark something as spam because it slipped through. 🤔

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bradenslen
bradenslen

@pauljacobson Very little gets through. In fact it's so good I have to check my spam folder for legit comments that got flagged as spam. I think we take it for granted now but it really is nice to have Akismet rather than a captcha on everything.

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pauljacobson
pauljacobson

@bradenslen Definitely. I've had it active on my site for years, and I've never regretted it.

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kitt
kitt

@bradenslen @pauljacobson I wish I had your Akismet experience. I have 3-10 spam comments a day come through that I delete. A spammer will find a post, and a bunch of other spammers rush in.

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bradenslen
bradenslen

@kitt Yikes! You must attract the A-Team spammers. My other WP blog uses AntiSpamBee plugin. Free. It has been very good. Maybe you should try it.

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kitt
kitt

@bradenslen thanks for the suggestion. I'll look into it. My site isn't WP, so I'll have to see if a module exists or if I'll need to write one.

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ramblinggit.com
ramblinggit.com

@bradenslen I see that some bloggers will add Webmention support to their website but have no other means to respond. I think that is sad. A lot of the comments on my website are from people who don’t have a blog of their own or use a blogging platform that doesn’t support Webmentions.

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ramblinggit.com
ramblinggit.com

@vasta I have had very little had access to any bloggers I read on a regular basis. In my circle of social contacts, I know very few people who blog on a regular basis. I have a large family. None of them blog. I have a large network of social and business contacts. None of them blog. In fact, I get strange looks when I mention my blog at social gatherings. Maybe someday I’ll actually meet one of the writers of the 200 blog that I read. Maybe the Princeton, New Jersey area is just not a blogging mecha.

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