This morning, we took the “Website” box off our comment form. This box would allow users to leave their website’s URL along with their comment. The URL provided in the box would then be linked from the comment author’s name.
I wanted to let visitors to our website know why we removed this option.
Helping to clarify what spam is
Our site, like many on the web receives a large number of spam comments.
We use the Akismet spam filter system, which does a remarkable job of filtering out many of the spam comments we recieve. In the last two weeks alone, our spam filter has caught more than 1,800 spam comments on our site. Many of these comments involve commercial interests, who place comments on other sites with the hopes of directing traffic to their sites.
Unfortunately, however, Akismet misses a small number of spam comments. We can manually remove these comments, but we do not like doing so. As a college newspaper, we are committed to giving the community the opportunity to share their opinions and ideas on issues we cover.
As spammers get smarter, they become more clever in the kinds of comments they leave. Many spammers now try to leave a somewhat related comment, and then leave a link to their business’ website in the “Website” box.
For instance, Obama’s anti-charity proposal has been the target of a great deal of comments that I would classify as spam.
One user, Rob, said:
“It would be nice if he could ba compassionate to everyone but some groups will feel left out.”
From this comment, Rob used the “Website” field to link to his weight loss website.
We do not want to limit the speech of users who have comments such as this, but also do not want our site to be filled with short comments that only partially relate to the content of our stories, and are really not very well thought out, or even spell-checked when the intention of the author is really only to have a link to their site on our site.
When links are put inline with comments, it becomes more obvious whether the intention of the comment author was to spam our site or not.
If a comment says “This is a cool page.”, followed by five lines of links, the intention of the author is more apparent.
Confuses some users
Secondly, I have found that many comment authors who provide relevant and interesting comments are not always familiar with the “Website” box.
Some comment authors will use this box to leave a link that is relevant to the content of their comment, but not to them individually. It does not make sense to click on the author’s name to get to these places. Feel free to leave these links in the comment box.
Please continue to post links in comments!
While we are discontinuing the website box on our comment form, we strongly encourage users to use links in the comment section where they can be beneficial. If you are referring to another article, etc. a link can be an invaluable tool to help others understand the point you are trying to make.
How to include links in comments
You can leave a link on our site simply by copying the URL into the comment body. As long as you have the “http://” on the front, it will be converted to a link.
If you want to get fancy, you can leave a link to a page with different text displayed on the page. For instance, if you wanted to link to Google, you might not want to see http://google.com/ in your comment, but instead Google.
To do this, you can use a little bit of HTML. While it might be a bit confusing at first, it can come in handy, as it works on all of the Gustavus blogs, on HTML pages, and alot of other places around the web.
You will want to include <a href=”*****”>#####</a>, where:
***** is the URL, and
##### is the text.
For instance, the code for this link to Google is:
<a href=”http://google.com”>Google</a>
We want to hear from you!
If you have any questions, or comments about this change in our comment system, we would love to know. Feel free to leave a comment below.
As always, thanks for reading The Weekly!