Working at Home on the Internet

A Short Story on Professionalism

A Short Story

I tried a new plugin, Better Comments Manager by Keith Dsouza and I couldn’t get it to work. At ALL… on either this Blog or on My Computer Back in Service.

So, I checked to make sure that the file was downloaded properly and unzipped correctly. I created a new folder on the server and Re-Uploaded all the files that were included in the original download.

It still wouldn’t work for me. It seems to work for most others, if comments on his post are any indication. There were some exceptions of course, but only a couple.

I’m not sure why, maybe it was intuition, but I logged into one of the Blogs using FireFox and tried it again. It worked with no problems. So, I tried it on this Blog using FireFox and it worked perfectly. But it still wouldn’t work when I used Internet Explorer.

I have written before about how things work differently on various Browsers and the importance of CrossChecking. It seems that Plugins are no different in dealing with different browsers.

The Solution

I sent an eMail off to Keith to let him know about the problems I was having using IE7 and explained politely that there are a lot of IE users out there and that they may not be able to use his plugin as well. Therefore, he was probably not reaching a big portion of his intended end users.

Within 2 days I got a return eMail from Keith with a link to a new download that contained all the necessary fixes. I am quite sure he didn’t write the fix just for me, but it does show how professional he is when it comes to his work. He made sure that something he wrote, that has his name on it, performs at or above the expectations of the end user.

Epilogue

Better Comments Manager works as promised.

Responding to comments individually or en mass is simplified through the Admin Page of your WordPress Blog (In IE And FF).

I would highly recommend it to anyone who has any comments to answer, especially if you have numerous comments on a particular post. There is a feature included that will show you ALL the comments on a post so you can respond accordingly.

Keith is just starting to write some plugins for WordPress after changing over from the Joomla platform. (He wrote quite a few add-ons for them too).

If he shows as much dedication to his projects in the future as he has for BCM, then you can be assured that his plugins, or anything else he shares, will work as promised.

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August 29th, 2007 at 06:10am | Posted by Joe | Plug-ins, Reviews | 2 reader remarks | Print This Post

I Got Help Fighting Spam on Old Comments

How many times have you heard (read) me say “I HATE SPAM”?

Seems like a Zillion, I know. I almost get tired of saying it. But I will keep on saying it, and fighting the Good Fight against Spam.

Most people I know who Blog use Akismet, Bad Behaviour and the like. So do I, but recently I have been getting a lot of Manually Input Spam on older posts. Things that have been around for months with nary a comment and suddenly there are 4 or 5 or more comments. They have nothing to do with what the post was about, just the usual “Nice Post…” with a link hidden in the signature leading to a nefarious (read porn, drugs, etc.) site.

I’m not really sure why this started happening. It’s only been a recent phenomenon, and I have been handling it through comment moderation. Maybe it’s because I’ve been around for so long (Oct ‘05) and have well over 700 posts or because I have a PR5 or just that Spammers are getting sneakier. Whatever the reason, it is getting to be too much.

I did come across a Plug-in for WordPress that seems to be the answer for this most recent spat of spam. It’s called Comment TimeOut 2.0. I’m not sure where I found it, probably from one of my daily reads, but thanks for the tip whoever it was.

Here’s what Comment Timeout 2.0 does according to the Author, James McKay…

• Allow comments on posts less than x days old: This indicates how long to leave comments open after a post has been published. If no comments are received during this time, the comment form will be closed. The default is 120 days.
• Also allow comments until x days after last approved comment: This indicates how long to leave comments open after the last approved comment in the discussion. Comments in the moderation queue, spam and deleted comments are not counted. The default is 60 days. If you do not want the discussion extended when comments are received, set this to zero.
• Or on popular posts until x days after last approved comment: Same as the above, but for popular posts. If you don’t want to consider any posts to be “popular”, set this value to the same as the previous one.
• Where “popular” means at least x approved comments: This indicates how many comments a post must have in order to be considered “popular” and entitled to the longer interval between comments. The default is to increase the timeout to 365 days after 20 comments.
• On older posts: When this is set to “Close comments”, the comment form will be closed on older posts and any attempts to post a comment will be rejected. When it is set to “Send to moderation queue”, the comment form will remain open, but all comments on older posts will be flagged for moderation. The default is to close comments.
• Trackbacks and pingbacks: When this is set to “Treat as comments” (the default), trackbacks and pingbacks will be lumped together with the comments in the calculations. When it is set to “Handle independently”, they will be subject to the same rules as the comments, but treated separately, so if you are getting a lot of comments but few trackbacks, trackbacks may close before comments, or vice versa. “Do not time out” means that trackbacks and pingbacks remain open indefinitely, regardless of what happens to the comments.
• Apply these rules to pages, images and file uploads: This indicates that these rules should be applied to anything that isn’t a post within your blog chronology, i.e. pages, images and file uploads. If you uncheck this, pages that have comments open will have them kept open indefinitely by default.
• Allow individual posts to override these settings: This indicates that individual posts should be allowed to specify their own timeout values. If you are not using this option, you can gain a little performance by turning it off, as it uses an extra database query on each request.

I just installed it this morning, but I did check out some of the older posts and the comments are all closed on anything older than 120 days past. I also noticed on the newer posts that there is a note in the comments section giving a date that comments will be closed for each post.

I, for one, am really thankful to James for writing this Plug-in. Now, I don’t have to review useless spam comments and close comments manually on posts that everyone except the spammers forgot about.

Technorati Tags: Comment-Timeout, Spam, Anti-Spam

June 12th, 2007 at 11:27am | Posted by Joe | Plug-ins, Spam | 4 reader remarks | Print This Post

The Mysterious Missing TLA Ads

 

Some of you who have been subscribed to my RSS Feed (subscribe) for a while now may have noticed that I had some Advertisements running at the bottom of the feed. They were personal ads, leading to the Forum, an affiliate program and lastly for my Hire Me page. They were all part of the Text Link Ads Feedvertising (advertise on feed) feature.

Since April 4th None of the ads have shown on the feed and I didn’t have any idea why they just stopped showing. I had contacted the support people at Text Link Ads (aff) as soon as I realized there was a problem and got no response. I finally contacted Patrick Gavin, President of TLA, to explain my situation and how disappointed I was with the lack of response to my queries.

Patrick did respond personally within 2 days that they were researching the problem, but didn’t have any answers yet. We communicated back and forth a few times, and the answer was that they had no answer. It seems that no one else had reported such a problem, but they would continue to research it.

It has been over a month since this problem started and I still haven’t gotten any satisfaction or answers on how to fix it. I decided to research it myself, looking for any clue as to what was causing the disappearance of my RSS Ads.

As I mentioned, the Ads showed until 4/4 and then stopped abruptly. What I did was load all my feeds in my RSS Reader. I went back to when they showed and started looking. Everything for TLA was downloaded and installed properly, ads show in the sidebar as they should and I even had an ad that was sold for an individual post showing.

Still nothing in the Feed showed. But, I think I found the answer.

Shortly after the ads stopped showing (actually the next day) I had installed the WP-Polls Plug-in. It uses Ajax for polls. For whatever reason, that seems to be interfering with the function of the TLA Plug-in that governs the RSS Ads.

I have deactivated the Polls Plug-in, I don’t really need it that badly. Hopefully, That is the Answer.

So, if all you RSS Subscribers would do me a favor and keep an eye out to see if the Ads start showing at the bottom of the Feed and drop me a comment or an eMail, I would be very grateful. Thanks.

Tip: Watch your Plug-ins, they may cause some unseen and unwanted problems.

Update: I just received an eMail from Patrick Gavin, President of TLA, and they upgraded the plug-in for this type of situation. He thinks it will solve the problem. I uploaded the new version right after his mail, so let’s hope it works. Keep an eye open please. And Patrick, thanks for responding to an affiliates needs, it is very much appreciated and shows how professional you and your company are.

Update II: IT WORKS!!! I just rechecked my Feed and it shows one of my Ads at the bottom. THANKS Patrick and team…

Technorati Tags: Text Link Ads, TLA, Patrick Gavin, Plugin

May 21st, 2007 at 12:03pm | Posted by Joe | Advertising, Plug-ins, RSS | 10 reader remarks | Print This Post