Tag Archives: blog comments

Blogging

Fake And Lousy Comments

30 Comments

I didn’t write anything last week; well, that’s kind of a misnomer. I wrote an article for my accountant’s blog, but that’s it. I decided to take a week off to get my mind straight and come to grips with a problem many of us bloggers have… that being some of the comments on our blogs. To better describe it… I’m going to start with a little story.

I played piano from the age of 10 until the age of 40. It was a pretty interesting 30 years that started inauspiciously enough and ended with a standing ovation.
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Blogging

The Spam In Our Blogging Lives

60 Comments

I’d like to share a comment with you that I got on one of my posts:

HI Mitch

I just loved reading your articles. 😀

The best thing which I really like about your articles is, you covers each and every thing in your articles which makes your article more helpful.

I have seen people love to read those articles more which are easy to understand and can help a lot. And you always write such kind of articles.

Either way, Thanks for this wonderful article.

SPAM

Carlos ZGZ via Compfight

Isn’t that nice? Looks like a great comment doesn’t it? Unfortunately, not only is it not a good comment, it’s actually spam. How do I know this?
Continue reading The Spam In Our Blogging Lives →

Blogging

Your Comments Going Into Spam For No Reason? I’ve Got One…

39 Comments

I have a few consistent commenters on this blog. Most of them I’ve known for quite a few years and they’re pretty popular commenters on the blogosphere as well. And yet, some of them have an interesting problem.

~Balance~
Stuart Williams via Compfight

They’re comments have been showing up in my spam filter, and spam filters of other blogs they comment on. They didn’t do anything wrong as far as they knew, and as far as I knew either. One day their comments were showing up fine, the next day and every time after that they were going to spam.

Now, I do have some settings where some people are going to go to spam. One too many words in the name field, email addresses that begin with certain words… that’s where you’re heading. If I’ve named you as spam and added your IP address, you’re going to spam. But that’s not what was going on with these folks.

A couple of weeks ago I decided it was time to check something out. I was talking to Brian at Hot Blog Tips about it and I asked him to send a comment to me using his smartphone. He did and his comment showed up without going into the spam filter. He thought that maybe it was coming from a different IP address.

I then wrote our buddy Adrienne about it in the private message area of Facebook and asked her to try the same thing. It worked for her as well. However, when I looked at her IP address I noticed it was the same as her normal comments, and when I looked at Brian’s I noticed the same thing. So it wasn’t the IP address.

But I had the mind working well at this juncture. I asked Adrienne to pull up a different browser and send me a comment. She did and it went through; yippee! I told her it worked and asked her which browser she normally used, and she said Chrome.

I then reached out to Brian and asked him to try leaving a comment on my blog using a different browser. At the same time I asked Mitchell Allen if he’d try leaving a comment on this blog using a different browser as well. Both of them did & their comments came through just fine.

What browser were they all using? Chrome! In my mind, it was a pretty good experiment and possibly the reason so many people were ending up in spam filters around the world! Well, that might be dramatic, but one of my friends is in India and he always goes to spam, and I’m not sure which browser he uses.

Firefox cupcake
Mixy Lorenzo
via Compfight

Now, whenever I see something like this that looks like a pattern, I always go to Google to see if there’s anyone else mentioning it. There were lots of topics that looked like it, but they were all talking about something else. So maybe I get to scoop them all! 🙂

Meanwhile, Adrienne decided to try something else first. What she did was uninstall Chrome, reboot her computer, run her antivirus program, reload Chrome, and try again. This time her comment came through perfectly; problem solved.

The only question would be what’s in Chrome that could be affecting so many people? Well, there’s a second question, which is what if it’s not just Chrome users this is affecting? Anyone else who shows up in the spam filter isn’t a regular writer, at least yet, so I don’t know if the initial problem could happen with other browsers and could be solved by switching.

So, this is a twofold testing question for all of you. One, if you notice that your comments, or the comments of someone who comments on your blog often, seems to be going into the spam filter, ask them to try a different browser to see if their comment comes through fine. If it does, ask them what browser they originally used and let’s find out if it’s a Chrome thing (by the way, I’m a Firefox user). Tell them that if they want to continue using their regular browser to try uninstalling, then reinstalling to see if that takes care of things (running the virus program wouldn’t hurt, but I’m not sure if that’s a part of it or not).

If it doesn’t, then it’s possible they’re really on a blacklist, which is a totally different issue and one I’m not ready to address right now. Still, I know I’ve taken care of a couple of people who comment so far, and maybe we can help some other people as well. As an addition, I was talking to Adrienne about this and supposedly some people have found that if they leave everything off before the domain name that it seems to work for them & CommentLuv still works. So try domainname.com to see if that might cure your issue also.
 

Blogging

People Aren’t Getting Your Response To Their Comments – A Redux

18 Comments

Wow, how time flies. It was just over two years ago that I wrote a post asking people to check their blog commenting systems because many times when I comment on their blogs I’m not receiving anything telling me my comments have been responded to. That post was well received, and got a nice number of responses.

Thomas Leuthard via Compfight

You know what? It seems that it’s time to bring this subject up again, and in a weird way it ponies on a topic Brian, Sheryl and I were talking about once in a video. I was lamenting how it seems that so many times I visit blogs that have titles making me think I’m going to see something new, only to see the same, tired thing I’ve seen previously. And Brian said that even if something is old to us because we’ve been around a long time, it’s a new concept to someone.

That being the case, I’m bringing this up because I figure that many of you aren’t intentionally ignoring me and my comments. The thing is I visit so many blogs and many new ones that I don’t often remember where I’ve been. If I’ve been to your blog often I’ll at least remember to check back on that one but many others… nope, no clue. Thus, I might be thinking you’re a blankety-blank when in reality your commenting system isn’t letting people know you’ve responded to them. By the way, I always check the boxes asking to be informed of responses, though not all of you have that on your blogs.

What should you do to check things out? As I said two years ago (just so everyone knows I’m being consistent lol), go to your blog post (you might have to sign out or use a different browser), sign in as if you’re leaving a comment but use a different email address, write yourself a comment (make it short), and after you get your notification of your comment go into your blog, respond to yourself, and see if your other email address gets it.

You can do this on an existing post (if you do, I’d recommend being the first commenter so you’re the only one who’ll see it & you can delete both before anyone else sees it) or create a test post and go through the motions, then delete everything.

If you get it, then others should get it. If not… well, now it’s time to see what’s wrong. You might have your setting wrong or you might need a separate plugin to get it taken care of. At least you’ll know to take care of the issue.

My final words… this is happening on some of the blogs of those of you who comment here, whose blogs I may have written a comment on. I’m not calling out any names; if you check, you’ll know who you are. lol
 

Blogging

Comments That Get Sent To Spam

28 Comments

I must say it’s been an interesting last 4 months on this blog as it pertains to comments. I wrote a post back in March saying how I was changing how I accept comments here, and much of what was on that post is above the comments box.

Commit no nuisance
Simon Webster via Compfight

Yet, for some reason, comments still come in with those things that I said would send them to the spam box. And you know what… not one person who’s shown up in the spam box because of a violation of policy has ever written to ask about their comment. Those who have are folks who, for some reason, end up there even though they do everything correct, and I pull their comments out of there; I say sorry in public to Adrienne & Rummuser for that. Go check out their blogs because they’re very informative and entertaining; in that order. 🙂

What is this quest for good comments you might ask? And what makes bad comments?

The quest for good comments is because it makes interactions relevant. A bad comment is one where I talk about colors and you come back and say “looking at colors is important on a blog” or something like that, and that’s all you offer; ugh. I deleted 3 of those from my previous post on being a colorful blogger. I know those are people being paid to write comments or people who are cruisin’ and could care less about their comment being responded to; I mean really, what can you say in response to something like that?

The same goes for people who use “info” as the beginning of their email addresses. Once again, how do I know that the person leaving the comment is going to be the person reading the email? I’d bet that at least 75% of the time no one’s going to read the email because when I was letting those email addresses through in the past I think only 2 people ever responded to anything I specifically said to them. If this is you and it’s supposed to be legitimate let me teach you something about branding; that’s not how it’s done. You want people to trust you then you make sure you use “your” first name and the extension should be your website.

That’s another point. While we all let these things go through, addresses that use gmail, hotmail, yahoo or the rest aren’t great for branding. If you want people to take you seriously, use a website or blog extension as the email, with your name or nickname at the beginning in some fashion.

Let me say this; I’m not necessarily against people who write comments for a living. What I’m looking for is a bit more effort, an attempt to at least look legitimate as far as someone who might actually care about what’s been written. Yes, as a writer of multiple blogs, I like to think my efforts are being appreciated and not just a place where you get to drop a link to your client, or your own blog, with little effort. At least give people a reason to say “hey, that’s a great comment, let me go back to their blog to see what they’re all about.” After all, aren’t you really being paid for that, to help drive business, rather than just trolling for links?

A guy who’s pretty good at that is Carl, who comments here often. He gets paid for commenting, but he leaves true comments, will respond to some of my comments back to him, and still gets to drop links to his clients. I don’t mind that as long as he’s not linking to an affiliate program; yeah, don’t do that either because even if the comment is good I’ll keep the comment but remove that type of link. And don’t even think about dropping a link to an inappropriate site. What’s inappropriate? If I don’t like it, it’s gone; that’s inappropriate. lol

I’m not the only one who feels this way. Adrienne, whom I mentioned above, has a very strict commenting policy. My Hot Blog Tips buddy Brian has started doing the same thing and he’s even harder than I am. Sure, we all risk losing people commenting, our traffic going down, and our rankings suffering in some fashion. But those who are serious about things know that they can come here and, if they’re predisposed to do so, can even talk to others who have left comments because they’re pretty good, and yours truly has vetted them; oh yeah!

Still, if you think I’m a bit too harsh, let me know below, but don’t write something like “I agree; people should write better comments” and think I’m leaving it here. That will just prove you didn’t read the post. Let’s face it, I’m not getting any younger. 😉