Comment rating and filtering with SezWho

I’ve added SezWho to the comment area. SezWho enables rating and filtering of comments, and shows you even comments an author has left on other blogs. Neat.

Currently there are no ratings, so the existing comments are all rated 2.5 (quite good). Once you’ve rated a few comments, you can suppress all lower quality comments (rated below 3), or show high quality comments only (rated 4 or better).

Don’t freak out when you use CSS that highlights nofollow’ed links. SezWho manipulates the original (mostly dofollow’ed) author link with JavaScript, hence search engines still recognize that a link shall pass PageRank and anchor text. (I condomize some link drops, for example when I don’t know a site and can’t afford the time to check it out, see my comments policy.)

I’ll ask SezWho to change that when I’m more familiar with their system (I hate change requests based on a first peek). SezWho should look at the attributes of the original link in order to add rel=”nofollow” to the JS created version only when the blogger actually has condomized a particular link. Their software changes the comment author URL to a JS script that redirects visitors to the URL the commenter has submitted. It would be nice to show the original URL in the status bar on mouse over.

Also, it seems that when you sign up with SezWho, they remove the trailing slash from your blog’s URL. That’s not acceptable. I mean not every startup should do what clueless Yahoo developers still do although they know that it violates several Web standards. Removing trailing slashes from links is not cool, that’s a crappy manipulation that can harm search engine rankings, will lead to bandwidth theft when bots follow castrated links only to get redirected, … ok, ok, ok … that’s stuff for another post rant. Judging from their Web site, SezWho looks like a decent operation, so I’m sure they can change that too.

I’ve not yet added the widgets, above is how they would appear in the sidebar.