{"id":1455,"date":"2007-12-10T08:00:38","date_gmt":"2007-12-10T13:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1455"},"modified":"2007-12-10T05:24:07","modified_gmt":"2007-12-10T10:24:07","slug":"gravatars-comment-links","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1455","title":{"rendered":"Gravatars & Comment Links"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve changed a few things about the comments around here.<\/p>\n

The regular WordPress policy is to put a “nofollow” tag on the comments so that search engines will not give “credit” to the website of the person who left the comment. The idea is to take away a lot of the incentive for spamming comments. It happens anyway, but at least the process is made less rewarding for the spammer. In theory.<\/p>\n

But this means treating all commenters like spammers, which I dislike. In any case, it’s a needless policy on my site, since my anti-spam measures<\/a> block 99.99% of it, and I manually delete the rest. The upshot is that I don’t have spam comments, and so treating all commenters like spammers because some of them might<\/em> be spammers is silly. So, I turned off the “nofollow” thing. This means that if you leave a comment and provide the URL to your website, you will get “credit” for the link.<\/p>\n

The other thing I did this weekend was add support for Gravatars<\/a>. <\/p>\n

I saw Gravatars in action in the comments at Terminally Incoherent<\/a>, and thought it looked really cool. Long threads can get confusing when you’re trying to keep track of who said what. I’ve found I remember “faces” better than names (even if the faces are just abstract icons or logos or whatever) and so when everyone has their own icon I find the whole thing easier to follow. <\/p>\n

This is one of those things I’ve been waiting for someone to invent. I hate how you can’t have personalized icons when you comment at a blog, and I hate uploading the same user icon every time I join a new forum. Gravatar can, in theory, solve both problems. Once you set up a Gravatar it then becomes a “portable” avatar that you can take with you to other websites and forums – provided they support Gravatars. If you change your Gravatar, you don’t have to go to a half dozen different sites and make the change manually. It just happens. <\/p>\n

It sounded really cool. It was very easy to code. It’s based on email, so (in theory) if a user has a Gravatar all they need to do is supply the email address when they leave a comment, and their avatar icon will show up. <\/p>\n

Sadly, after setting it up and putting it into place I realized that nobody<\/i> uses it. At least, nobody around here. I checked some of the old comment threads (from back in the days when I used to get 100+ comments) and not a single avatar showed up. Sigh.<\/p>\n

I’ve left Gravatar support in place to see if it catches on. We’ll see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve changed a few things about the comments around here. The regular WordPress policy is to put a “nofollow” tag on the comments so that search engines will not give “credit” to the website of the person who left the comment. The idea is to take away a lot of the incentive for spamming comments. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-projects"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1455\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}