So Long spammers, and Goodbye to (some) comments

Robot painting a no spam sign: dabbled.orgHello all… Dot here. Yes, I still love you guys, but the eternal war with spammers has brought me to a crossroads. Dear spammers: No, none of my readers want to buy your essay, really–And the comments have always be ‘no-follow’, so Google doesn’t even notice your link. But telling them this has been in vain, so I’ve made the decision to get rid of WordPress comments, and have only Facebook comments.

Why now?

If you’ve been around the crafty/bloggy web as long as I have (2007!),  you’ll have noticed that the importance of comments has changed dramatically over the past few years.  I used to only be able to tell how popular a post or project was by either looking at the stats, or getting feedback in the comments.  Comments were the way we all communicated, and I will say between blog comments and Twitter, that was the way I built some great relationships!   But times have changed, and blogging/craft-blogging has changed with the rise of social media as a real force.  I don’t control the conversation anymore, my projects are floating around Pinterest, or shared in a variety of other social ways.   People don’t want to talk about it here, they want to talk about it with their friends.  Which is awesome, but it has definitely changed blogging.

Why Facebook?

No, not the evil Facebook, I hear you say! Although I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook, most everyone has an account, so most everyone will still be able to make comments. I’ve had facebook comments available as an option for a while, and people seem to like them – you can choose whether your comment shows up on your timeline, so it’s a neat way to “like” a Dabbled project, and even share why with your friends! Also, your Tweets referencing any Dabbled article will continue to appear in the comments section, and old comments will still appear. So nothing’s REALLY lost. Except your ability to find cheap drugs or term papers, sorry!

But what I I need your wonderful guidance, Dot?

One thing that I will say, is that I don’t watch the facebook comments as closely (kinda like how slack I am on comments on the Facebook Page!) so if you have a question for me about a project, feel free to drop me an email – you’ll get a better response. It’s Dot at this website, you can figure it out.  Or send me a tweet (@dotatdabbled), that works pretty well too.

How to Get Rid of WordPress Comment box (while leaving your old comments)

You know I have to throw on my developer hat and tell you how to do this yourself, right?  If you’d like to do this to your blog, there are a couple of options.  One is to simply turn off comments in your Dashboard settings (Discussion section).  That will turn off comments for all future posts.  For past posts, set the “Close Comments after X Days” to 1 to close all the old ones.  This should leave your comments, but not allow more.

However, because I had already added Facebook comments (and they were tied in to my WP comments, in that they already added to comment count, and so forth) I didn’t want to do this.  In my case, I edited the comments.php to remove the line <?php comment_form(); ?> (which is what calls the comment form, specifically).  So, everything else still works exactly as it used to, but the actual form is never called.

So…

Continue to enjoy the posts on Dabbled, and continue to comment, or share, or whatever works for you.

Cheers!

Dot