ShushThatNoise is a WordPress plugin that lets you hide obnoxious comments without deleting them,
Edit the comment and wrap the offending text in [shush][/shush]. Example: [shush]FIRST!!![/shush] or [shush reason="Boring"]FIRST!!![/shush]Readers can choose to read the buried comment by clicking on the “Show” link.
This exchange at Boing! Boing! — in an item over companies lobbying against the stupid card check union bill that will almost certainly become law — left me giggling,
Libertarian fapping in 3… 2… 1…
Oh, wait.
They’ve already begun.
@5 Chris Tucker
“Libertarian fapping in 3… 2… 1…”
whats wrong with libertarians?whats wrong with libertarians?
If anyone decides to answer that, the discussion needs to remain polite.
whts wrng wth lbrtrns?
f y wnt scty dtrmnd by blgcl mprtv ln, thn nthng.
Is that civil enough Antinous?
Dreaptha @16, Man on Pink Corner @17, OhhhSnap @67 if you have substantive complaints about the EFCA, fine. If you’re just here to dump lazy insults on labor unions, not fine.
MDH @83, I don’t know if it’s civil enough for Antinous, but it wasn’t civil enough for me. If you’re told a topic is off-limits, then the topic is off-limits.
Watching BB’s moderators is like witnessing some school yard insult contest.
I don’t frequently find myself in complete agreement with WordPress blogging guru Lorelle VanFossen, but I completely agree with her that closing comments on a blog post is a Very Bad Idea (in fact I made an argument against that practice here last July).
The primary reason that people appear to close comments is they think it somehow cuts down on the amount of spam, but VanFossen argues it won’t make much difference,
The “old posts” myth about comment spam is that comment spammers hit older posts more than current posts. This is also not true. Comment spammers will hit EVERY post they can. Comment spam bots and human spammers don’t check the date of the post before they hit, thinking, “Hmmm, this one is at least six weeks old, ripe for spamming.”
Use the right keywords in your blog post and you can get comment spam in the time it takes to hit Publish and load the post to see the results. Words like credit, foreclosure, mortgage, finance, debt, and such attract comment spam faster than flies to honey. An article I published here on the Blog Herald on Give Credit When Credit is Due: Skip The Middle Man was slammed by comment spam within seconds, all aimed at promoting the get-rich-quick and out-of-debt-over-night schemes. The article had nothing to do with any of these things, but keywords are keywords in the eyes of spammers.
But even if it does cut back on a few spam, it causes much more problems by sending a negative message to readers (and, as I argued, often prevents peoiple from posting relevant information that corrects or updates a post).
On another blog using an auto-closing comment WordPress Plugin, they had asked for help with only one unhelpful reply of commiseration. Since I had the answer to their problem, I wanted to let them know in case they were still battling with this issue. Without any way to comment, nor a direct link to their comment form, I gave up. Guess they didn’t need my help after all.
I come across that sort of situation all the time. On the other hand, since I never close comments I often find people will post insightful answers to questions years after I post something. For example, seven years after I wrote a blog post about the source of a claim about World War II, a vistor finally posted the answer the other day in a comment.
Someone sent me a link to a story on ZDNet about the best netbooks to buy this holiday season, and all I wanted to do was post a short comment about the MSI Wind. So I enter my comment and hit the submit button, at which point I get a page from ZDNet telling me I need to register and provide all of the following information in order to submit a comment (and it is all required except for the Address 2 field).
Are they high?
Along with BackType, I’ve been using CoComment for awhile to try to keep track of all the comments I leave on blogs and websites.
Unlike BackType, CoComment relies on a browser plugin to actively track every comment you post. Once you create an account at the CoComment website, you install their plugin and after that every comment you post gets sent to CoComment as well, associated with your account and with information about where it was originally posted.
It is a wonderful idea that is less useful in its actual implementation. First, it tends to be extremely unreliable — many comments I post never show up at CoComment despite using the plugin. Second, sometimes it is slow to the point where it interferes with posting a comment.
That said, as with BackType it is still better than nothing. Using CoComment, BackType, and a few other tools it is possible to start getting a nice record of all the comments you’re leaving at other websites. It’s still a whole lot harder to do than it should be, however.
Lately, I’ve been trying to come up with solutions to better track the numerous comments I leave both at this site and across the Internet. At the moment there still aren’t any good solutions for this problem as a whole, but services like BackType are starting to fill the void.
BackType scrapes comments off of a number of popular websites and then lets you find your comments by linking your account to the URL you use to identify yourself at those sites. For example, I commonly use the URL for this site when making comments at other sites. So BackType lets me associate comments with that URL to my BackType account.
It’s not perfect — it seems to have a fairly small coverage limited to a small number of very popular blogs. Even then, the comments it has scraped are very recent . . . for example, it only picked up 17 of the comments I’ve left at Unpublished.net.
But, it is better than nothing, and in conjunction with similar tools out there, at least gets the ball rolling to start tracking your comments.
