The site is three months old now. I still obsess about how many visits I get, so I check the site stats several times a day.
I use WordPress to run the site, which is a weblog tool. I don’t consider my site to strictly be a blog, but it’s an easy way of running things. I’m not up on web definitions though, so maybe it IS a blog. Who knows?
Anyhoo, WordPress tells me whenever visitors leave comments. I set it so I need to approve them before they appear on the site. At first, when I would see the little number next to comments it was exciting, because it meant that people were checking the site out. After a while though, it became obvious that the comments being left were some kind of generic spam comments because they never commented directly about the content, only saying things like “Wow! You’ve given me things to think about!” or “This was precisely what I was looking for.” Others were for suggestions to improve my site by adding some of the bells and whistles that I had already included.
At first, I kept a couple of the comments because, they were questions I felt merited answers, even if the person who asked the question was just leaving spam to try to get me to link to his blog. Now, I just delete them. See WordPress ALSO tells me when people visit a particular page. If I get a comment on a page that got no hits that day, then to me that’s spam. I don’t know how these spammers do it, but I’m not going to play into their game by posting the comment. I put up a warning to that effect in the sidebar, but it hasn’t helped.
I expect that most comments will be left on the home page, it just stands to reason. For some reason though, Funny #003 – Tinker Toys, is extremely popular for the spammers. I don’t know how that one stands out for them, but it’s just the way it is.
SO…the lesson here is, if you want to have your comment posted, it helps if the comment is about specific content. My “articles” are comics, drawing and stories about anthropomorphic animals. I don’t know that any of these “articles” are particularly informative, though I do hope they’re entertaining. So don’t tell me you learned something! Tell me my little gag made you laugh, or that you enjoyed my story. Oh and you should probably leave your comment on another page beside Funny #003…that just raises my suspicions as to your intention.
If somehow you leave a legitimate comment and it doesn’t get posted within 24 hours, send me an email to let me know!