I am delighted when people comment on this blog, it’s what makes me want to keep writing. But recently there have been a number of abusive and provocative comments. Therefore, I would like to ask everyone to ensure that from now on comments are polite and friendly (nearly all of your comments are!)
In the future any comments that are racist, sexist, rude, abusive, or written with the deliberate intention to provoke, will be deleted. Please also remember to enter a real email address with your comments (your email will never be published). Any comments that do not have a real email address, or that come from the same IP address with different commenter names, will be deleted. Finally, only comments in English or Spanish will be accepted.
Thanks for helping me to keep this a more friendly place from now on!
Tom
30 Jun 08 at 10:41 pm
Ben, you big Nazi!
(Just kidding… I think this makes sense.)
I would disagree with the ‘deliberate intention to provoke’ bit, though. I mean if you’re talking about inflammatory comments then yes, but being provocative isn’t always a bad thing.
Bill
30 Jun 08 at 11:42 pm
@Tom – of course provoking a constructive debate is a good thing (and pretty much a requirement for a blog such as this). However I assume Ben is talking about comments that contribute nothing apart from provoking a slagging match.
Unfortunately there seem to be a few people intent on hi-jacking the site (you might have missed the nasty comments since they get deleted pretty quickly) so I guess we need to be on best behaviour, well for the time at least
Edith
1 Jul 08 at 12:56 am
@ Tom,
Nazis wouldn’t have a problem with racist, abusive, or sexist comments…
Jonk
1 Jul 08 at 1:52 am
Nice one Edith.
What’s your policy on using keywords in the “name” section of the commenter Ben?
Ben
1 Jul 08 at 8:07 am
@Jonk, people can put what name they like within reason, but as for using keywords, I don’t think it does any good in terms of SEO, I suspect the Goog is trained to ignore wordpress comments.
@Tom – yes, inflammatory comments are what I’m referring to. Those designed to deliberately wind up the Spanish that visit the site for example.
@Andrew, your comment was silly and inflammatory, therefore not approved.
Tom
1 Jul 08 at 8:56 am
@ Edith – touché!
Parubin
1 Jul 08 at 9:42 am
I still don’t quite understand how some people still are fond of constant provocation. Even when an easy, light-headed, good-hearted, uncontroversial and naive nice post comes (such as Spain winning the Euro Cup) still some one finds a quick way to make a annoying and silly comment intended to start a trashy nonsense series of comments full of bab vives.
I prefer to take no notice to these comments, but still sometimes I find myself entering the stupid game of responding to trollish unintelligent provokation.
These type of comments generate traffic but add no value (at least my understanding of value) to the site, which could end up like a franchise of garbage sites like 20-minutos or The Sun or whatever (all of the very successful in terms of traffic, by the way).
There is always the eternal debate of sustainable quality of the content vs. repercusion, but I’m sure 99% of the regular visitors to this forum are interested more in the first than in the latter. At least me, if a was interested about a slagging contest I’d run to look up some other place, more suitable for that, than NFS.
Dean Hunt
1 Jul 08 at 10:48 am
Jonk – WordPress uses the nofollow tag as default, so it would be of zero use in Google.
Dean
luke
1 Jul 08 at 12:52 pm
This site is a positive and realistic view of Spain. Any abusive comments just bring shame to those who have written them. I imagine most of them come from lonely teenagers who will, hopefully, one day grow up to be intelligent, caring adults.
Edith
1 Jul 08 at 6:00 pm
@ Parubin,
I agree entirely!
@ Jonk,
Ben has already answered yiur question.
Tom - politics and culture from barcelona - Clarke
1 Jul 08 at 6:30 pm
@ Dean – I don’t think that the nofollow tag is applied to commenters’ names (at least, it isn’t here, or on my own WP installations). That said, I think Ben’s right in that blog commenters’ names are given a fairly low rank by Google.
Stanley
1 Jul 08 at 7:16 pm
Am I allowed to say xxxxxxx? (Edit by Ben, NO!)
gary
1 Jul 08 at 10:53 pm
@ stanley, you just did!
@ Parubin – its mischievous attention seeking and an adolescent yearning to see how far you can push it before it snaps. Things now seem to be back to normal.
Jonk
2 Jul 08 at 12:36 am
Tom, it’s my understanding that WordPress does automatically add the nofollow tag to comments.
However, while the link doesn’t pass PageRank, Google actually still does visit the link in most cases. I generally get pages indexed by leaving comments on the (No-Follow) website JohnChow.com.
While I would say it’s a waste of time going on a linking campaign by commenting on No-Follow blogs, it takes the same time to type a keyword-stuffed name. If you look at it from a cost-benefit attitude it’s worth thinking about.
Ray
2 Jul 08 at 9:10 am
Every blog worth reading has to remind its commenters every once in awhile… there’s actually real people on the other end of the keyboard.
It’s a good thing, too, as sometimes I forget.
Tom
2 Jul 08 at 11:47 am
@Jonk – Hmm… well I checked the source for this very page. The rel=’nofollow’ or rel=’external nofollow’ only shows up on links to NFS feeds or in the ‘Recent Comments’ widget in the sidebar. I can’t see how it could be happening if it doesn’t show up in the code for this page, or on my own blog.
Unless we’re talking at cross purposes.
Ben
2 Jul 08 at 11:54 am
I think the nofollow only shows up in links that are posted IN comments themselves. Like this:
http://www.notesinspanish.com (is great
)
Ben
2 Jul 08 at 11:56 am
Yes, a no follow was added automatically to the link above. But I really doubt that keyword laden ‘name’ fields in wordpress blog comments does much for pagerank, the Goog will have covered that.
gary
2 Jul 08 at 12:37 pm
It just seems to me that having good and interesting content is the only way to ‘game’ Google – ie not game them at all but deal with people not algorythms…
I enjoyed these articles
http://www.internet-based-business-mastery.com/index.php?s=buzz+marketing
Jonk
2 Jul 08 at 2:31 pm
Ben yeh you’re right 100% about the PR thing. I think what people angle for is the relevance thing… Although I just did some research and it says that it doesnt pass on relevance at all.
@ Tom as far as I understand the Nofollow attribute for the comment names is added elsewhere, in the Meta Tags or something like that. And then whichever spider automatically doesn’t pass PR on the names.
It’s an interesting topic.
Anyway this sounds bad but I have a PR5 and a PR6 blog and I have taken nofollow off the comments there, and regularly slip in my own comments linking back to my other sites.
Matt NY
7 Jul 08 at 3:10 pm
Apparently you also need to watch out for comments that other people post on your blog, because in Spain you can be held accountable for them.
I just read this article about a blogger who was sued by the SGAE, (the General Society of Authors and Publishers) or the Spanish RIAA, for having a post on his blog in which, the court says, the comments that were left damaged the “honor” of the SGAE.
The article asks, “The questions then raised: is it safe for anyone is Spain to offer open comments on a blog? and is this even a legal under European law?”
Matt NY
7 Jul 08 at 3:11 pm
http://www.inquisitr.com/1504/spanish-riaa-sues-and-wins-blog-comment-case/
and there’s the article.
Jonk
7 Jul 08 at 5:08 pm
That’s bizarre. Free speech FTW
Perro Callejero
16 Jul 08 at 10:07 pm
Sorry I’m a bit late on this, and I wasn’t going to bring it up, but since I see this post I thought it might be opportune to ask.
I posted a comment on a post several weeks ago that was not inflammatory at all, did not include language, etc. It appeared, but a day later it was gone. Did I do something wrong? I certainly didn’t mean to, I just wanted to ask so I could avoid it in the future!
The only thing I could think of is that sometimes I forget which I used last and put “Perro Callejero” or “Jordan” in the name box, so I guess that might fall into the “two different names, same IP” rule.
Ben
16 Jul 08 at 11:23 pm
Hi PC/Jordan, that is weird, we have a spam filter that automatically does a great job of filtering out all the bad comments, but it is weird that yours came and then went. I know who you are (as in you are a cool forum member) so I find it really hard to believe I would have deleted your comment without realising. So many apologies and please keep posting!