this is really brilliant stuff.

re: avoiding spam: a friend of mine is a high-level techie who was involved in a giant anti-spam deal lately where hir organization grabbed all the spammers’ domain names from a botnet, and cut down the incidence of spam by huge amounts. the blog recording the specifics of this, most of which i am too uneducated to comprehend, is at http://foxgrrl.livejournal.com/ some of it is friendslocked. but i’m sure you could get access by sending an offlist message.

very william gibson… except nobody’s firing radioactive bullets into shipping containers full of money. well, maybe virtually.

ok fine..I’ll add ‘value to the conversation’..sheesh.

This plugin provides incentive for ppl to blog your post links as well as prevention of thos who are intentionally running around dropping “Great post” comments to score a linkback from commentary. At the same time, killing numerous spambots from doing the same, which is a primary reason for not choosing dofollow for comments.

I used commentluv when I operated my Wordpress blog so I could show appreciation for my commenters, but after a short period of time, my spam box filled with tremendous amounts of spam that was a hassle to sort through in an already busy day.

dofollow for trackbacks is much more reasonable.

Just a quick note..It’s always good to remember that there will be many commenters who are learning as they go along with your posts, and even a “Great post” comment is a good one from those who are innocently appreciative. :=)