Periodically, in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I?, we see the naive request.Please, take a minute and let me know how safe my blog is.
Here, the blog owner wants to know whether it's possible that his blog might be classified as a spam host, in the near future.
This is a request that, no matter how genuine a blog, and a blog owner, may appear now, cannot be fulfilled with any degree of accuracy and authority.
Whitelisting blogs against spam classification is a service that simply cannot be provided, when requested.
A single blog, viewed now, cannot provide an adequate view of the blog population, and of the immediate threat.
- Many spam farms can only be detected as groups of blogs, where individual blogs may appear quite benign and genuine.
- Many blogs, apparently benign and genuine right now, may have a spammy payload applied later.
- Many spammers would appreciate immediate evaluation of their blogs, so they can more easily determine where the boundaries may lie.
- Many spammers would enjoy the ability to argue, later, how they may have been mislead by inaccurate advice - with the possibility of forcing a reversal of their confirmed status.
Spam classification can only be conducted by the automated classification process - which is deceptively accurate and effective - in spite of arguments provided by confirmed spammers.
As a blog owner, you need to concentrate on providing informative, interesting, and unique content to your readers. And be selective how and where you advertise the blog, considering carefully what content may not be appreciated by everybody.
Focus on developing your blog - and don't waste time asking for services that cannot be provided. And use some common sense techniques, to reduce the risk of spam classification.
Once we get our blog working, with lots of steady reader traffic, we want interactions with our readers.
Eventually, we get tired of native Blogger commenting, and its inability to use comments to conduct casual and meaningful conversations with our readers. Sometimes, our thoughts turn to having a forum, where we and our readers can chat with each other.
One very light weight forum can be embedded in the sidebar.
CBox and Meebo are chat rooms embedded in HTML / JavaScript, and an IFrame. It's very easy to setup CBox or Meebo on your web site - just register and get the code for either, and add it to an HTML / JavaScript page element. You can see Cbox in action on my home blog, and Meebo on my Layout Test blog. ShoutMix is a similar, alternative product.
If you want a full featured forum, Google Groups lets you setup a forum - and then embed it into your blog - as easily as you can setup a blog. Or any other forum will do just as well. It all depends upon what you want.
A full featured forum, using industry standard software, will involve hosting a phpBB based forum.- Load the phpBB software onto a suitably setup server.
- Configure the software to provide your forum, as fits your personal vision of your forum.
Having setup the forum which pleases you, it's now a matter of combining your new forum and your blog, just like any two web sites - using blog feeds, iframes, and / or links - and your imagination.
In another techie forum, far, far from Google Groups: Google Blogger Help, there are a couple sub forums dedicated to providing advice about Computer Networking. Every couple months, somebody will post in thereCan you provide explanation of how Ethernet works, and how was it developed.
orWhat are the advantages of using WiFi over Ethernet? Please cite 5 major factors.
These questions are easily recognised by the experienced helpers there, and are quickly labeled, as "Homework Central". And there's an unspoken competition among the experienced helpers there, to quickly and imaginatively label such questions, so no newbie forum members might confuse the threads with others containing serious content.
Such threads are not completely unwelcome, when they are occasional, as they provide some relief from the tedium. The experienced helpers will occasionally come up with witty responses - sometimes more questions, sometimes mildly helpful answers.
Homework Central trolling is specific to forums where the subject of the forum might be, legitimately, taught in a formal brick and mortar classroom, ie a high school or college.
In Google Blogger Help, we don't have "Homework Central" trolling - there are no brick and mortar classrooms where Blogging 101 might be taught. But we do have trolling.
And we treat trolls in Google Blogger Help with no more courtesy than we do in DSL Reports. Particularly in the case of the persistent and unimaginative drek that we have been seeing recently.
>> Top
