No, no one has read my posts yet. I am not publicizing this website on my own facebook page yet, either. But I already found one benefit! Spam reduction.
I have my comments moderation turned on. So before a spam comment can hit my site, I am asked to approve or reject it. Today I got a comment with a trackback. Of course, it was automated spam. I know that because, I have disabled wordpress comments and only have FB comments enabled.
Now that I have validated that it was spam, I am confident that I can blindly mark as spam and delete every comment approval request that I get. At this time I only get a comment once or twice a month at most. But if this system proves right, I can automatically have them skip my inbox with a rule/filter. Yes!
When a comment does come through facebook however, I can be pretty confident that it was a human who actually read it and commented. Facebook rules. Thank goodness for facebook!
3 comments
NoahsDad
February 11, 2012 at 3:46 pm (UTC -8) Link to this comment
I see that you are no longer using the Facebook comment system…why not?
JohnVarghese
February 13, 2012 at 12:16 pm (UTC -8) Link to this comment
Hi NoahsDad. Thanks for the question. FB comments was good for a while. It completely stopped any spam, but it did not encourage any commenting. May be because my content is not comment provoking – I dont’ know. Hopefully it was because people don’t want to use their fb profile to comment, although they had an option to not post the comment on the FB wall.
Also I was not very fond of how it retained the Facebook branding in my comment section. It was discontinuous from my theme. Lastly, the inability to post with my twitter or other popular IDs was a big let down. I personally like using my twitter ID where ever I need to authenticate as a real person.
I did some research and found that disqus was a very good option. I planned to use disqus. A bit more research revealed livefyre had better features out of the box – for example showing a link to your latest blog post right after your comment. The best factor in livefyre’s favor was their awesome fast support.
JohnVarghese
August 9, 2012 at 11:35 am (UTC -8) Link to this comment
@JMattHicks How can I quickly find blogs using livefyre?