December 24th, 2007 by Robert · 4 Comments ·
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You may be aware of the issue I was having with Akismet generating a false positive for spam on my comments, as detailed in my post HowTo Deal With Akismet False Positives. As detailed in the post, I got in touch with a blogger or two who agreed I was not in fact a spammer and marked my post accordingly, submitted Akismet’s contact form and of course made a post detailing the whole thing. I did also post a comment on the Akismet blog using my other domain as the submitted URL. Later I found Matt Mullenweg’s contact form on his site and bugged him about it, too.
I always expected the problem to be resolved, but it came even quicker than I figured. It’s Christmas time so you’d figure it’s going to take a few extra days. That’d be no surprise. What was a surprise is that just a few hours later, The Matt himself fixed it. A couple hours later, Mark from WordPress.com support sent me an email asking me to do a test post, as he’d seen my posting on the Akismet blog. 2 good quick responses — that’s pretty hard to beat!
Thanks again to Matt and the WordPress / Akismet team! While I find it super difficult to actually type the name correctly (starts off Akist, then I correct to Akisment, then I get it right…EVERY time!) even though I can spell it just fine, it is easy to use and the support certainly has been helpful.
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December 23rd, 2007 by Robert · 23 Comments ·
In WordPress.com APIs: HowTo Use Akismet and WordPress.com Stats I talked about Akismet, which is Automattic’s spam-fighting plugin / service. I’ve been quite happy with how well it worked. In a year or so of use over at my other site, only 1 or 2 spam comments ever made it through. I didn’t have a huge volume and read all comments, so they stood out and were easily marked spam and got rid of. Akismet made things easy and to date stopped almost 1300 spams with virtually no effort on my part. Go team!
So there was no doubt in my mind that Akismet would be a vital part of this site. Little did I know that it could also be a big problem, too.
I noticed that none of my comments on other sites were showing up. I figured that maybe they were set to moderate all first posts by a user name and email combo, and no one had gotten around to approving them yet. It went on longer, and I wondered if maybe my sometimes flaky connection was causing me problems. I checked with Michael Martine over at Remarkablogger who had a disclaimer message about moderated comments. He told me that he found my comment in the spam queue instead. Whaaaa?
He very kindly marked me “Not Spam” but as of yet, I’m still on the bad boy list. I did some testing, and it looks like using my name and email with my older domain goes right through as a normal comment, but if I list webmarketinghowto.com as my URL then Akismet will mark it spam. I’ve done this from the same IP, so that’s not it. Maybe someone who previously owned this domain was A Bad Guy?
What Does It Mean To Be Marked A Spammer By Akismet?
While Akismet is great at protecting blogs from spam comments, it’s very success can cause you huge problems if you wind up on the spammer list, because you will now be prevented from commenting at 99% of the blogs running WordPress out there (I just made that figure up, by the way 
) or any other platform that Akismet has developed a plugin for. Since WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms out there, you can see how this can hurt you pretty badly. Blogs are all about presenting information and discussion, so you will be locked out of that aspect. Now I could not use my URL, but that won’t help the community aspect much. If I post something interesting (hey, it’s a possibility!) it would be more difficult for people to find other content from me that could be useful or informative.
Not only that, but if I do comment somewhere and the blog admin doesn’t examine his Akismet queue looking for mistakenly-marked legitimate comments, then that will confirm the mistaken judgment, further exacerbating and extending the problem. Spammers certainly are getting more and more creative all the time, and some of their comments are relatively subtle, though I don’t think I’ve posted anything that would be confused for one of these new tricky comments a la “Hello…Man i love reading your blog, interesting posts ! it was a great Sunday” with a link to a celebrity blog or something like that. This was an actual example of a spam currently in my queue over at my other site.
This will also mark your trackbacks and pingbacks as spam, too, so there will be little way to interact with the community outside of forums and email.
HowTo Resolve The Akismet False Positive Problem?
There a couple of things you can do, and hopefully it will not take too long.
First, contact blog owners where you’ve posted and have them check their Akismet queues. They can find your post, look at it, and check the “Not Spam” box. From there, hitting the “De-spam marked comments” will submit this to Akismet so it can learn from it’s mistakes. So far, it’s been a couple-three days with no change. I have no idea how long it takes or how many examples, but I hope it isn’t too many or too long.
Another option is to use Akismet’s contact form in order to ask them to look into the situation. This page uses a basic math question instead of Akismet just for this very reason:
* Note about this question. You might wonder, if these guys are so good at spam blocking why would they put a stupid question like this on their contact form to keep spam out? Well, Akismet is great at protecting contact forms, we use it on all our other sites, but on Akismet.com sometimes people use the contact form to tell us they’re being blocked by Akismet.
If you think about that, blocking people when they’re trying to tell us they’re wrongly blocked would probably frustrate them, hence the math question.
There is yet a third option that may help. You might create a post dealing with that very problem, and hoping that they might see it somehow, come to your rescue, thus enabling you to write a fawning “thank you!” post later. I’ll let you know either way.
Has anyone else run into this problem? Did you find other avenues of support?
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December 21st, 2007 by Robert · 3 Comments ·
Increasing traffic can have some pretty different meanings. On the road, it’s another sign of frustration to follow. On the web, it’s more people coming to visit your site and see if you’ve got anything useful to say. One good way to increase your traffic can come from your fellow bloggers. Michael Martine decided to experiment in boosting blog traffic. Think about it — this can provide multiple benefits.
- It drives traffic to his site. While you’re there, you might find other Related Posts of interest, and decide to check them out, too. I did. I am a voracious reader.
- You can drive traffic to your site by commenting and have other people checking out your website in return. How much traffic will that end up being? Who knows, but it’s all worth a shot and creates back links. It all depends on the participants, amount of traffic on the various sites, etc.
- It can expose you to other blogs worth reading. Of the 4 people who first commented, I had an outside interest in several of them. One specializes in Loss Prevention and I passed that link along to my dad, who is also in the security field. We’re also using the same theme. Maybe he would like to read it, though it is not a subject I am directly interested in. Another specializes in real estate in Tampa, Florida. This interests me because I’m thinking idly about where we should live next, and I see information on diving too, which is another interest. I also have another friend who is in real estate in Tampa, so he should be aware of the competition and I’m going to pass it on. The Common Culinarian was interesting, but I had to leave the site before I got too hungry!
- And before you know it, you’ve bashed out a quick but useful post illustrated with examples. How cool is that? It’s not even like work!
Just further proof that there’s all sorts of good information out there on the net, and you can find it in the most interesting and unusual ways. What ways have you used to drive traffic to your site?
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December 21st, 2007 by Robert · 4 Comments ·
What’s a Permalink?
A permalink is nothing more than the URL to your posts and pages. It’s called a permalink because it’s something that shouldn’t change, otherwise you’ll break other people’s links to you. I’ll break them down into 2 different types:
Not Useful, AKA default:
http://domain.com/?p=123
It works for any server environment, but offers you nothing by which to identify the post, unless you’re a savant who just remembers those sorts of things. It’s not useful, despite it’s relative simplicity. It doesn’t tell a human or a search anything about the contents of the URL.
Useful, AKA mod_rewrite / PATHINFO:
http://domain.com/year/month/day/post-name
http://domain.com/category/post-name
See how much better it looks and how more useful it is? There are a variety of ways to build the structure beyond the name. The /year/month/day/post-name is default, but you can use a variety of other descriptors, such as author and category as well. You can even use hours, minutes, and seconds, but I think it’s easy to agree that it’s too granular and would be distracting in most conceivable uses.
The only difference between the mod_rewrite and PATHINFO variants is that mod_rewrite requires use of the Apache webserver with the mod_rewrite module activated and small changes to the .htaccess file. PATHINFO permalinks will look the same, but require the element index.php between your domain name and the rest of the permalink.
Your Options | Permalinks page will allow you to choose which method you prefer:
The debate rages over whether you should or should not include dates in your permalink structure. I’m not going to re-hash that here, but I use them as it’s an easy way to distinguish posts from each other and let you know when it was made. It works for me but opinions differ, and you are free to choose your own structure.
I Want To Change My Permalink Structure, What Do I Do?
If you’ve already set up your permalinks, or accepted the default style, but would now like to change to a different format, all is not lost. Plugins exists to issue a “301 Redirect” so that browsers and search engines are redirected to the correct permalink so that you will not lose search engine rankings and traffic.
Scott Yang’s Permalink Redirect WordPress Plugin and Dean Lee’s Permalinks Migration Plugin will assist you with updating your permalink structure while still retaining your readership, existing links, and search engine position. The Permalink Redirect WordPress Plugin also will prevent you from having duplicate links for the same content. It can redirect your domain.com to www.domain.com (and vice versa) and prevent duplicate entries from traffic coming to your directories with or without the trailing slash at the end, so it has additional value that you may find useful.
So which permalink structure do you use, and why? Do you prefer dates or no dates?
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