Writing a blog can sometimes feel like sending your thoughts out into the ether on a one-way ticket. If you’d like to know what other people thought of your blog, you might want to consider letting them add comments or backlinks to your posts. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to control who can leave comments, how to delete comments you don’t like, and how to hide comments on one post or on all the posts in a blog. In addition, you’ll see how to display and create backlinks.
Of course, comments and backlinks are only a reaction to what you’ve written in your posts. If you’d like others to help write the blog entries themselves, you can add blog authors to your blog in order to let them create their own entries.
There are various schools of thoughts about comments. On the one hand, it’s nice to get feedback and have a conversation about the topics you’re discussing. On the other hand, you probably want to exercise some amount of control over what others write on your blog. Blogger gives you a fair bit of flexibility to choose where you stand on the Settings | Comments page.
You may or may not agree with me that it is OK for folks to post anonymously, but if you do, it’s absolutely essential to require that only humans—and no spam spewing robots—be allowed to post.
If you’ve followed the instructions up to this point, you’ve allowed visitors to comment anonymously (page 114) and you’ve allowed comments to be posted automatically within 14 days of the post being published (page 116). Both of those actions will allow a certain amount of spam to get through. You want to make sure that you are the first to know it so you can respond immediately. To do so, have Blogger email you each time someone comments on your blog.
A backlink shows a link from an external site that points to your blog. It can give you an idea who’s talking about what you’re posting.
If you want other people to be able to publish their own blog posts (and not just comments), you can invite them to be one of the blog authors.
An Open invitation is one that has not yet been accepted by the prospective blog author.
Blogger’s default settings require visitors to sign in—and thus have a Google/Blogger account—before they can leave comments. While this can help protect your blog from unwelcome comment spam, it can also keep visitors from making legitimate comments. I show you how to accept comments from anyone, even without a Blogger account, on page 114.
Sometimes, comments don’t appear right away, as we’ll see on page 116.
It has been my experience that making people register before they comment will significantly reduce the amount of comments received.
Using Word verification is Blogger’s default option. Only turn it off if you have other antispam measures set up.
Moderated comments are not posted right away. Visitors who post a comment that gets moderated will see this notification:
Blogger will also let you know that you have comments to moderate with a message to that effect on your dashboard:
Click the link to jump to the Posting | Comment Moderation page.
Unless you have chosen Only blog members on page 128, it’s absolutely essential that you moderate your comments. If you don’t, you may find your blog filled with unwanted ads and rude commentary.
A spammer’s favorite ploy is to add links onto an older, but still popular blog post that you’re not watching as carefully.
If you have a busy, public blog, it may be better to moderate all comments. To do so, click Always next to Comment moderation.
In that case, comments won’t be posted until you reject or approve them on the Posting | Comment Moderation page.
Visitors can also remove their own comments as long as they have signed in with the same Blogger account that they used when posting the comment.
Nobody besides the commenter and the blog owner will see the garbage can icon.
The Remove forever? checkbox implies that if you don’t check it there might be some way to recover a deleted comment. That’s not the case. It’s simply badly named. It should be called Remove completely? since when you check it, Blogger leaves no trace of the comment.
Sometimes bloggers like to leave the remains of a deleted comment to show both that they get a lot of comments and that they are keeping them under control. Me? I delete completely!
You can let people add comments again at any time by going back to the Posting | Edit Posts page for that entry and clicking Allow under Reader Comments in the Posting Options section.
If you’d like to not only disallow future comments but also hide any comments that have already been posted, click Don’t allow, hide existing. Note that hidden comments are not deleted and will reappear if you choose a different option for Reader Comments.
Commenting is allowed on new posts by default. Change the default on the Settings | Comments page by choosing New Posts Do Not Have Comments next to Comments Default for Posts.
Comments are not deleted when you hide them. If you decide you want to show them again, you can click Show on the Settings | Comments page. That also means you can’t delete all the comments and start over from scratch. The old comments remain (though you can delete them as described on page 118).
Backlinks are a great way to see if other people are blogging about what you’ve blogged. While comments are conversations between individuals about your posts, back-links are conversations between blogs or web sites about your posts.
For more information about using Blog This!, see page 92.
The Create a Link option is only useful for creating backlinks on Blogger blogs. If someone wants to create a link to your blog from anywhere else—any kind of blog or web site or whatever—they can just do it in the normal way. Blogger will find the link and report it in the backlinks section no matter how it was created.
New blog authors will be able to post, edit, and delete their own entries, but won’t be able to modify other authors’ posts or change the blog’s settings.
If you change your mind about adding a new author, or if you add the wrong email address, you can cancel the invitation by clicking the remove link next to the person’s address in the Open Invitations table.
If an invited author doesn’t respond after a while, you can remind them to join by clicking the send again link in the Open Invitations table.
You can’t remove an author’s admin privileges unless at least one other author has admin privileges.
You can change ownership of your blog to another person by adding them as a blog author, making them an Admin as described on page 126, and then removing your own privileges. Note, however, that as soon as you click the revoke admin privileges link next to your own name, you will immediately be locked out of the Settings | Permissions page for that blog. You won’t be able to change the blog settings unless and until the other Admin returns the admin privileges to you.
Blogger restricts access to protected blogs by requiring blog readers to sign in with their Google/Blogger account when they go to view your blog.
You can use Blogger to organize a completely private journal for yourself, that no-one else can read, by making yourself the sole blog author, and restricting access to Only blog authors.
If you create a private blog, be sure not to list it in your profile. You can adjust which blogs are listed by editing your profile and clicking the Select blogs to display option. For more details, see “edit privacy settings” on page 100.