SezWho Offers Portable Reputations : Web Worker has a thorough writeup on the SezWho service which allows commenter reputation and rating across the web. Installation is really simple with their WordPress Plugin (also for MT). Web Worker seemed cautious about professing the success or viability of this service. However Read/WriteWeb, who is already using SezWho, was a lot more upbeat about the prospects. WeblogToolsCollection on the other hand, has been bitten hard by third party services and their scalability issues and I am going to shy away from this one for now. Sadly, it is quite hard to determine the dependability of a remotely hosted service from just their SLA and their promises, especially if their financial model is shaky.
That’s a good call Mark. Even on a smaller scale with my site, I still try to shy away from third-party services because if even just one is down, it causes problems on my site — which I hate.
That’s another reason I run my own adservers, my own analytics, and I try to self-host whatever I can — so it’s dependent on me, not other people.
Don’t use the SezWho plugin right out of the box unless you don’t like your blog and would enjoy having it “hacked.” In the download the profile.php file just includes a random URL passed to it.
I downloaded it about 3 weeks ago, so I could make sure it worked with INAP, found the exploit, and warned them about it, but all I got in response was
Caveat Emptor.
Aaron, We have removed the offending file from the distribution…take a look and let me know what you think…
Also Mark, About the scalability issues, we have setup the service in such a way that you web site will continue to work the without any issues even if we go down…And for the QOS point of view, take a look at the service at RWW/download time etc. and they have over a million page views a month…
Thanks,
Jitendra
Interesting. I shall have to try it out.
Personally, I feel that this will discourage comments on your blog. I like hearing from my readers and hear what they are thinking about what I write. However, with this plugin installed, people might shy away from commenting. If others don’t care for what they have to say, it might give them a bad reputation. I just feel that it’s better to let my readers comment away, without fear of what the consequences are for their reputation.
I think this is a great move away from MyBlogLog, being able to gauge the reputation of my active visitors would make it alot easier to filter the noise from many discussions.
I side with Mindanao Bob on this one. I’m thinking that it would just discourage participation from the readers because they’d be afraid to get rated or something.
Am I reading this right? This is a plugin that allows you to rate the people commenting on your blog by the quality of their comments?
If that’s the case I totally agree with Mindanao Bob and Reyn, this can surely only discourage comments. In fact, can anyone explain the the positives from this plugin??
Mindanao Bob, Reyn & Andy,
SezWho give them positive points for participation and provides them with a way to build a reputation that they can carry across different sites…Also for readers SezWho provides a way to find our more context on the commenter. We are seeing a significant improvement in the interactions in the community as readers are able to rate comments and participate without leaving comments. Overall this makes comment section more useful, thereby driving additional traffic to the blog (we are seeing an improvement in traffic to all site, directly via the sezwho system as users are clicking on the context links that we show on users)…
Check it out at ReadWriteWeb.
Jitendra
SezWho
Check it out at RWW