A change in the way comments are handled on our blog
Greetings,
We’ve upgraded the commenting procedure within the blogging application we use (GoDaddy.com ’s Quick Blogcast) to more effectively counter comment spam.
The first time we receive a comment from an email address unknown to Quick Blogcast, we issue an email asking the sender to confirm their address before passing the comment along. Once the email address has been confirmed, the comment will display to the owner.
This is not a retroactive measure, so if you’ve already posted to any of our blogs with your mail address, please be on the lookout for this confirmation.
Hooray! A positive-response system is a great idea. Having endured a few thousand spam comments, I'm glad to see you've decided to take on the issue so decisively.
Guys,
It's not related to comments but i thought to get your attention i should post it in the latest post. At the moment, i only get to see the number of subscribers i have but not their details. Shouldn't I be entitled to get the e-mail ids to which the feeds have been subscribed?
Secondly, i don't see detailed stats. I have seen some other control panels giving daily and hourly hits, a monthly hit graph, detailed list of referrers (not just the top ten or so but close to 50), the countries from which the hits are coming and so forth. Why can't I have similar detailed stats?
Greetings,
We've had a long running debate about that item, Striking a Balance, and it's still on our roadmap to include in a future edition. Finally we have a mechanism that addresses all of our concerns. Meantime there's a good way to work around this issue by using a service such as feedburner to manage the email subscriptions, as a bonus you also get access to more statistics regarding your blogs readership by feed.
Secondly the stats do have hourly and daily hits for entries that can be located under Stats , Article views. The referrers list I admit we are not doing a great job on and we're working on improving the display of the information we've gathered. The good news is we have the date , just that we're not displaying it time being.
Regards
John
QBC Team
Hi to you!
Sorry this is not related to this topic. But I have a question on m4a files. I started to chapter my podcasts and noticed there was an issue when I tried to publish the podcast. The "video" players shows up on the blog. And the file wasn't distributed. The behavior was quite strange.
Is there support for m4a files?
Francisco
Francisco,
Firstly I apologize for the delay in response as I was out of the office for the past two weeks. The Quicktime player shows up for any mp4 format ( m4a, m4b etc) since the small flash player can only read MP3. What shouldn't be occurring though is that the file isn't appearing on your RSS feed / site. m4a is an audio only file and I will check up , but thought that m4b was the more common extension for chaptered versions. Regardless of that they are MP4 files and I would rename the extension as such and see if this works as expected, if not get back to me and I'll arrange to get a file from you to trouble shoot where this issues occurring.
Regards
John
QBC Team
I am starting to get a lot of spam trackbacks. Is there anything I can do to stop it? If I block the IP address am I risking blocking other traffic in the future and will this make any difference in the incoming spam?
Greetings,
Robert, sorry for the delay, I was out of the office over the last two weeks. During my absence there was indeed an increase in spam trackbacks which was a concerted effort by spammers to interrupt Quick Blogcast. We've taken steps to prevent further occurrences and while I hate to say the level of spam trackbacks are back to "normal" we are continuing to add preventative measures and you should have noticed an improvement over the past few days.
Regards
John
QBC team
John, I am still getting a lot of spam trackbacks, about ten a day. One day I got about twenty. Is this because I had trackbacks open on my entries? I recently set default trackback to closed but I have a bunch of entries with it enabled. If I go back and close the open ones will it help? Is there a way to do this without going to each entry?
Also, whats up with statistics, I have some that are going backwards. How come my daily article views don't match my hourly article views? Thanks, Robert Shendock.
Greetings Robert,
There's a way to disable comments/trackbacks simultaneously but not just trackbacks.
From the manage entries view you can go select all articles, and on the dropdown "select action" Disable comments/trackbacks.
While you may not wish to disable comments we've found that most comments that occur on items over a month old are likely spam . I've been planning to make this a choice for users to switch off trackbacks after so many days / weeks.
On the matter of stats I'll have to take a look though what may have occurred is that the daily figure and hourly figure displays are showing information from different timezones. E.g we have one set of figures but in one case it's being displayed at 0 GMT and the other your chosen timezone. This would of course be an error and we'll take a look into the stats.
Regards
John
QBC Team
Hi,
I just wanted to thank the team for three recent additions to QuickBlogcast:
1. I know I said this before but that Save & Continue is the honey of honeys.
2. Being able to paste entries from notepad stripped of formatting is likewise major.
3. Adding Google Ads is effortless with your sidebar shortcut.
That's all. Now I'll go ahead and be subject to moderation.
Greetings Ali,
Thanks for the thanks. The QBC team were as happy as you appear to be re the inclusion of the save / continue feature ( a few of us are bloggers too after all. )
Ah yes, everything in moderation.
Regards
John
QBC Team
Yes, I noticed this new way to post comments some time ago when I posted a comment asking why you made me change the name I use when posting to my own blog. I never saw that comment show up, so I never got any kind of answer from you. I am still aggravated by being forced to change my name.
Greetings Julie,
I've been able to locate four comments tied to this URL and none of them broached that topic and I've been unable to locate this comment. User names are unique within Quick Blogcast and once you have one I am not aware of any circumstance in which we've asked a user to change their name.If you can send me the details I'll look into it. Every question is either replied to on the blog or if it's a specific user issue I often mail them for further details.
Regards
John
QBC Team
I posted a comment probably a month ago. I received the validation email and did what I was asked to do (I have deleted this email), and I never saw the comment show up.
Around that time, I received a message that my user name was not valid and I needed to change it in order to gain full access to all the system features. When my comment did not get posted, I changed my name from Prof Julie to ProfJulie (removed the space) and that seems to have resolved the message. I would like to change my name back to what it was before and am annoyed that I was forced to change my "pen" name for my blog.
Greetings Julie,
On further research , this slipped my memory on my first comment, I didn't relate your request to a recent change where we did have a message up asking anyone with a space in their name to change. Names with spaces created an error in one of mail servers when sending out comment notification mails which I'm afraid would make it impractical to change the account name back until a solution exists to prevent this. I'm going to investigate this further and see if an alternate solution exists.
Regards
John
QBC Team
Thanks for looking into this. I hope whatever the issue is can get worked out so I can add the space back into my name.
Is there any plans for a set of forums where us QuickBlog users can post our questions?
Seems as if you guys would gain just as much as we would since you wouldn't be answering the same questions over and over again.
Chris,
Excellent point but from my prior experience I would likely end up pointing people the location of the same answer
I'm post here when we get closer to having this in place.
Regards
John
QBC
Mostly I'm entering this comment just to test out the features and see how they work. I wanted to mention, though, two things. First, I realize that with paid blogs, the manager can add authors; is there no button for other users to request to become authors? Similarly, there's apparently no button for other users to request to add an entry.
Second, sometimes the blogs are really slow.
Greetings,
Thank you for your feedback. Presently there's no way for people to request an account within your Blogcast as we don't have an external entry point for users at this time. I have a feature for authenticated users , on the road map ,which will allow us to carry out such an action as well as allowing many more useful behaviors related to private or group related posts.
With regards to the blog being slow I'd like to know if it's specific areas you are experiencing this within or if it's a general condition.
Regards
John
QBC team