So, for starters I’ve removed the “no-follow” attribute from comment URLs using the dofollow plugin. Why have i disabled this anti-spam measure? Well, it wasn’t hurting spammers. Between Bad Behavior and Akismet my comment spam problem has dropped to nill; Bad Behavior stops most bots, and Akismet picks up the leftovers. So the only people hurt by “no-follow” are my friends who comment regularly and have websites. Since this is kinda like DRM – it doesn’t seem to affect the crooks, only those playing nice — it went poof.
Inspired by Donncha at Holy Schmoly!, I’m also taking steps to remove ads from the sight of my regular readers. Ya’ll ain’t going to click on those anyway, right? So no point wasting people’s money on them. I’m using the Who Sees Ads plugin to do this. It will let me make your experience more pleasant while I go a little more crazy with ads for people coming from search engines (which still makes up the bulk of my traffic). Previously I had been trying to balance the two.
4 Comments
Sigh. I guess I need to make some changes too. It’s always something.
Be sure to look through your akismet held comments before hitting delete. Akismet is great, but it seems like about 25% of the stuff it catches are valid comments.
Yeah, I look through them regularly, but Akismet’s only had a false positive for me three or four times out of tens of thousands of spam messages. Not sure what your difference is, there, but it’s been fantastic for me.
I get very few comments due to the nature of my site’s focus. Maybe I’m not getting spammed as much because I’ve only been around for 8 weeks.