Commenting guidelines
Akismet, my comment spam plugin, has worked hard the last couple of weeks. Lots of seemingly correct comments have been filtered out as spam. But I have also got a lot of completely useless comments that has passed through Akismet just to be deleted manually by me. Comments is incredibly important for me and also for many of you. The feedback I get from your comments is a huge help in my work, and often also a great source of inspiration. But there are also people who abuse the comment feature in different ways, and that takes away much of the value in the comments. It is time to do something about that now.
I read all comments and care for all feedback I get. But for various reasons which I will explain below, not all comments will be approved and published on this site. I reserve the right to choose which comments to publish and which to not publish, and also to edit comments if needed. This is not as harsh as it sounds, as I have even approved comments that appear to be obvious cases of comment abuse just to make sure that all opinions get through. I have been mostly friendly and accepted this for a long time, but in order to improve the quality of my site I will now apply a couple of guidelines to the comments.
Most of you will not notice the difference, but those of you who will be affected by it should of course know what I will not accept - and why.
Please keep this in mind before posting a comment:
- Feedback is always welcome, no matter what the topic is. But public comments should be relevant to the post topic and of interest to other visitors, so if your message is all about something else then please send an e-mail rather than posting a comment.
- The language of this blog is English, so please write your comments in English. Bad or machine-translated english is still better than Spanish, Russian, Japanese, French or Italian. Comments in Swedish (my native language) are OK, but since only a small part of the visitors of this site understands Swedish I reserve the right to translate the comment before I approve it.
- Please write your name in the "Name:" field of the comment form. Site names or keywords that matches your site content have been accepted until today, but since more and more comments appear to be posted just to get free keyword links to various sites I need to change this. If the comment is perfectly OK (written in english, on topic and in some way interesting to other visitors) but the comment author name is replaced by a keyword or site name, I will simply delete the URL from the comment. If this would become a larger problem, I would need to move the URL away from the comment author name - and I'd prefer to not do that. Names followed by site names, such as "Andreas / Tjuvlyssnat.se" or "Luka of Solucija.com") are still OK in most cases.
- Stick to your information. It is very common to see several valid comments with different names with different website addresses - but still coming from the same person. This obviously looks like abuse, even if the actual comment appears to be perfectly OK. Comments that are posted in this way will not be published on the site. If the abuse is very obvious, all the involved comments (and other comments from the same person) will be marked as spam through Akismet.
- The openness will remain. Visitors who get one comment approved will get their future comments approved automatically. I will stick to that arrangement as long as possible, and it will only work if you all use the feature in a good way. I trust that all of you who visit this site on regular basis want to keep it this way, right?
I will wait for some feedback on this list and then add it to a separate page so that it will be easy to find for new site visitors in the future. Feel free to let me know what you think, and please tell me if there is something I have got wrong or something more I should add.
And finally a related question: I have got many requests to add a discussion forum here, but would it be worth the effort? There are several good forums out there where you can discuss web design and website templates, but the request I have got has been to have a place for free discussions and to get support for my templates and themes. In short: A place where users of my templates could help each other - and get free help directly from me. I have no own opinion about this yet, but I would be happy to hear about yours. I can not possibly answer all questions I get over e-mail, so it is definitely worth asking all of you what you think.
Comments
Comment from Andreas
Time: June 23, 2007, 1:57 am
Thanks Dave! The openness is what gives me most of the inspiration, so I would not want to lose that. Without the feedback from template users, friends, site visitors and other designers, it would be hard to find motivation to spend most of my time by the computer. But I have also had some problems with rude e-mails because of misunderstandings, and when things are going in the wrong direction I need to adjust the path a bit. That is why I'm giving the comment feature a little nudge today, it will hopefully result in something good for most site visitors.
The forum idea is good, but the problem is that I'm already working full time with my site and with helping as many people as I can. If I would add a forum here, I would probably have to make it an official support channel instead of e-mail - and chances are good that it could result in more people getting help since template users could theoretically help each other.
But managing a forum is a lot of extra work, and there are already good forums like the one on OpenDesigns.org where a great community of designers and template users work together. And at the same time OpenDesigns.org is so much more than just my work, and I can't send all requests for help there and hope that someone else will provide all the answers.
A general support site for my designs is a good idea, and I'm already planning for the separate template pages that I've described earlier. I don't know if a forum would be good, or if i should focus at creating more material - and keep on helping people over e-mail. We'll see, I'll wait for more opinions - and maybe better suggestions!
Comment from Jason Cole
Time: June 23, 2007, 3:33 am
The forum may be a good idea, but if you go ahead with it, gather a horde of moderators before you even open it up, to help answer questions, clean up spam posts, and shoulder some of the workload. I really like your solution to spam or otherwise inappropriate comments, and I wish I could use such a solution for my own problem. Instead, I am simply killing my now-abandoned blog… It goes offline in 2 minutes.
Comment from sintra
Time: June 23, 2007, 10:50 am
Hi Andeas. You are right about spam and hopefully the methods you decided to use would have good results. I just posted a comment to another subject here with my site title instead of my name(my browser remembers the data and I forgot to change it :) )
About forum…. think twice before starting it. It needs a lot of work, it's time and money consuming, you will need experienced moderators to help you, not to mention good programers to work on it (for functionality, security, server and db admin, traffic and a big no. of users handle, marketing and seo)
Comment from Design
Time: June 24, 2007, 8:39 am
The spam one of most not pleasant things on the Internet but when for a spam accept the person which has no attitude it is not pleasant. As it is not pleasant also to me. I read blog Andreas already more than 4 months, sometimes I leave comment on good or interesting articles. But one fine day I have read through one of Andreas's excellent articles and wanted it comment, but have faced a problem of that I comment is not added. I was in a panic, to me it was bad because of injustice. I some times wrote to Andreas, but to participate in discussion and have not received.
Problem in that I cannot place the site for communication, me it is simply pleasant when having read through mine comment people still come on my site and look who I, than I am engaged.
After recent events I cannot make it. :O(
Comment from Andreas
Time: June 24, 2007, 9:53 am
"Design": I appreciate your comments, no doubt about that. But for some reason, Akismet is marking almost everyone of them as spam. I have missed a lot of comments from you (and others) before when I didn't check the spam comments on regular basis. That is one of the reasons why I need to put some extra energy on the comment management now. I need to make sure that all comments reach me - and that all comments which match the comment guidelines are approved and published as quickly as possible. And of course, that comments that are incorrectly marked as "spam" by Akismet are retrieved from the spam-list and approved without any delays.
With this in mind, I think that you should continue to post comments as usual. But I ask you to please use your name (or a nickname) rather than the word "Design", as I get more comments signed with keywords (mostly spam) than I get comments signed with names…
And also, the comment you wrote above passed through Akismet without any problem and was approved automatically, so if you stick to that e-mail address you should get your comments through in the future as well! And as said, from now on I'm browsing the Akismet spam comments as well every day to de-spam comments that are incorrectly marked, so hopefully you can continue to comment without worrying about the comments disappearing. :)
Comment from Huygens
Time: June 24, 2007, 7:49 pm
On my web site, I have written a small notice between the comment field and the submit button to warn people about possible moderation and what is appropriate or not.
Of course, this is a tiny excerpt, and it is pointing to a bigger article which describes it in more details. This article and the "code of conduct" are also accessible via my main page in the right column for any one to read.
My code of conduct is inspired a lot by the Ubuntu one. As the later was suiting my own needs, I just adapted it. May be you could have a look at it.
Comment from Torsten
Time: June 25, 2007, 12:58 pm
Spam is one of the largest problems of today and therefore I think it's a very good idea to have some restrictions for entries to your website. It enables you to improve your site and to avoid uninteresting comments or things like that.
Comment from Corinna
Time: June 27, 2007, 10:45 am
As spam finds its way to all of us, a few simple restrictions are needed. Therefore I think it's a wonderful idea to restrict the entry to your comments so that only those people can comment on something who are really interested in the topic.
Regarding the idea to include a forum into your website I think that a forum is a good idea in general but the people who want to discuss topics already have possibilities to do that at your site. Therefore I don't think that a forum is needed here.
Comment from Imker
Time: June 30, 2007, 7:07 pm
Hi Andy,
I am a Blogger and Webmaster myself and we all have the same problems with spam. The easist thing to delete is automated spam which is normally filtered correctelly by akisment and other. the other thing is human spamming. on a page like yourone every link builder is hot because he wants to get a backlink for free. one opporunity to handle the massive spam comments is to precheck before publishing, clsosing topics after 10-14 days and if anybody has got something to say he should write you an e-mail. if it´s important you will fill it in the page. There are also other out like the Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin but this is again nothing again human spamming attackt. the only thing you could do is possibly to enable comments only for registered members which needs to be prechecked carefully. no free mail addresses, no fake mail addresses,… it´s hard but in my opinion the only way to get out those spammers. A few weeks ago I read an article on the BBC online magazine that more than 90% of mails flying through the WWW are SPAM. just remember the amount 90% of every mail is Spam - let´s start fighting together. thx & best regards Imker
Comment from Craig
Time: July 2, 2007, 10:31 pm
I am certainly going to install this. I get a great deal of spam on my blog and it drives me mad. I leave them all for moderation and it's impossible to find the real ones within them all. Hopefully this will help me a lot. Thanks.
Comment from Khushal Khan
Time: July 3, 2007, 4:26 am
Akismet no doubt is a good plugin for Wordpress and helps to eliminate spam but at times it also carries away the posts made by friends,thats what happens to me atleast. Regarding starting a forum,i would say YES, atleast you will have a good platform for announcement of new themes, upcoming themes, users reviews and commments and etcetera.. Wish you best of luck!
Comment from Dave Butler
Time: June 23, 2007, 1:35 am
Andreas, comment spam has become one of the bigger problems with blogs and I appreciate the effort you make to keep your comments open. I feel its great to be able to interact with yourself the designer. I think your themes and another Wordpress theme, Cutline, are successful because the designers kept the comments open and answered questions. I don't think a forums is necessary because people can get feedback via other methods.