Working with comments and trackbacks
From PixyWiki
pixyBlog supports weblog comments and trackbacks, which provide a way for other bloggers to add comments to your blog remotely. By default comments and trackbacks are enabled, but you can turn them off on your weblog's Preferences:Settings page. Note that turning off comments, disables both comments and trackbacks.
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Comment notification via email
If you're going to leave comments turned-on then take the time to read them, to respond where appropriate and, when you receive spam or other forms of offensive comments, delete them from your weblog. You can't respond to comments if you don't know when you get one, so make sure you enable email notification of comments. You can do that on the Preferences:Settings page.
If you've got email turned-on then you'll receive an email every time you get a new comment and the email will include the text of the comment, a link to the entry that was commented upon and a link to the comment management page, shown below, where you may choose to approve, mark as spam or even delete the new comment.
Comment management and moderation
If you'd like to preview and approve comments before they are displayed on your weblog, then you'll want to turn on comment moderation via Preferences:Settings. When comment moderation is enabled, then each new comment will be marked as pending and unapproved and will not appear on your weblog. To check for new comments, go to the Create & Edit:Comments to check for and either approve or delete new comments. If you've got comment notification enabled, make sure you also enable comment notification so you'll know when new comments arrive. To moderate comments, use the comment management page, described below.
The comment management page
The comment management page, shown in the illustration below, allows you to manage comments for your weblog. If you arrive on the page from the link in a comment notification email, then you'll see only the comments for the one entry that was commented upon. If you arrive via the menu, you'll see all recent comments in reverse chronological order.
Comments that are suspected to be spam are shown with a light red background, with the spam check-box checked. Comments that are new and pending your review are shown with a light yellow background.
How to moderate comments
- Review each new comment and decide if it is to be approved for display, marked as spam and hidden or deleted entirely.
- Only comments that are marked as approved and are not spam will be displayed on your weblog. So set (or unset) the corresponding
checkboxes for each comment, or leave them the way they are.
- When you are done. Click the save changes button at the bottom of the page. You'll see that comments that were pending are no
longer pending and those that you marked for delete will be gone.
How to search weblog comments
You can also use the comment management page to search for comments across all entries in your weblog by keyword, status and date. Use the Filter comments area of the page to set the fields you want to search and click the Query button. If there are more comments than can be displayed on one page, then a next page link will be displayed at the top of the list of comments so that you can navigate into the past.
Preventing weblog spam
There are three forms of comment spam that can affect your weblog:
- Comment spam: spam that arrives via the comment form on your weblog. Sometimes spam comments are added by a human and
sometimes by a computer program known as a spambot.
- Trackback spam: spam that arrives via trackbacks sent by a spambot.
- Referrer spam: spam that arrives in web requests and appears on the Create & Edit:Referrers page in the login area or on your blog (but only if your blog theme uses the #showReferrers() macro).
Fortunately, there are counter-measures for each type of spam. For comment and trackback spam, you can use email notification of comments, comment moderation and trackback verification (described in the previous section) to manage spam. That's not all, pixyBlog also includes a blacklisting feature, which can be used to fight all three forms of spam.
Multiple levels of blacklisting
pixyBlog uses a blacklist, a lists of words which are used to check incoming comments, trackbacks and referrers for spam. The blacklist includes several thousand words and regular expressions which which are used to check incoming comments and trackbacks. If the name, URL or content of a comment or trackback includes one of the blacklist words or matches one of the expressons then that comment or trackback is marked as spam and is not displayed on your weblog, unless you use the comment management page to unmark it.
Actually, there are two levels of blacklist:
- Level 1 blacklist: This is the built-in blacklist and is managed by the pixyBlog team.
- Level 2 blacklist: Weblog specific blacklist, which you control in the Preferences:Settings page of your weblog.
Incoming comments and trackbacks are checked against all three levels of blacklist.
How to add words and expressions to the blacklist
If you have a spam problem on your weblog and you'd like to add words to the blacklist, it's probably better for you to contact us to add the words to the level 1 blacklist for you. That way, every blogger on the site will benefit from the addition. If you must do it yourself, here's how you do it:
- Go to the Preferences:Settings page and scroll down to the blacklist fields
- Enter your spam words, one per line
- Lines that begin with a left parenthesis will be treated as regular expressions (see the Java API documentation for java.util.regex.Pattern for a guide to regular expressions). Don't try to use a regular expression unless you really know what you're doing.
Sending trackbacks
If you are publishing about something you read on another weblog, you want to let the author and readers of that weblog know that you are doing so, and that other weblog is trackback enabled, then you should send that weblog a trackback ping. Here's a story that illustrates how trackback works:
- You read an interesting blog entry on Otto's blog. You notice that Otto's blog entry has a trackback URL, so instead of leaving a comment on Otto's blog you decide to comment by writing a blog entry in your own blog. You copy that trackback URL (using ALT-C, or right-click-copy, or whatever) cause you'll need it later.
- You go to your blog and publish a new blog entry in response to Otto's entry. Click the Post to Weblog button to publish your new entry. After you publish, scroll down on the New Entry page until you see the Trackback text field and button.
- Enter the trackback URL from Otto's blog entry into the text field and click the Send Trackback button. pixyBlog will respond by printing the response received from Otto's blog server.
- You should now see your trackback listed among the comments on Otto's blog entry.
Referrer rankings
The Weblog:Referrer referrer rankings page shows the hits that are coming in from other websites and weblogs that have links to your weblog and to specific entries in your weblog. By looking at your referrer logs, you can get an idea of who is reading and commenting on your weblog.