Is CommentLuv Selling your Blog Comment Links for Advertisers? Andy Bailey Clearing Things Up
Hesham Zebida
Have you ever tried to read a non-English blog and see what those guys are talking about? It’s really amazing thing, I have been doing this from time to time trying to know what others say, what is the discussions running on other languages, are they blogging about the same stuff we do in English blogs, do they have the same opinions, or they have different way to think about blogging as a tool?! Give it a try and you will discover tones of new ideas from here and there.
Who don’t know CommentLuv?
It’s known as the most interaction tool between bloggers, and the most famous WordPress plugin in WordPress lovers street, and it went more far than that, CommentLuv entered Bloggers Blogspot world after so many members requested to Andy Bailey the founder of CommentLuv to make it available for their blog platform, and here is a video explain for you how to setup CommentLuv to Blogger using JS-kit comments made by Andy.
I must say that there is so many reasons to love CommentLuv blogs, most bloggers and webmasters who is looking for building links and traffic understand what I mean, and there is no way to know what’s on Andy’s mind and what he will come up with, he is a full of surprises guy.
The answer is YES, there is more than one way to make money on ComLuv, and I recommend you take a look to ComLuv affiliate program, you can earn money by driving new members to signup and buy any of ComLuv paid services or advertise on ComLuv community, I actually got paid once for being the highest affiliates to ComLuv last October, it was awesome to receive this unexpected payment!
Is CommentLuv making any money from your blog?
Now! We know we can make money from ComLuv, but what we don’t know is CommentLuv making or welling to make money from CommentLuv enabled blogs?!
I found a blog post in a non-English language talking about some CommentLuv server errors happen when commenting on CommentLuv enabled blog, I have translated the post to read it, and I discovered interesting thing happened with the guy who wrote it, he was telling that CommentLuv server sometimes return a wrong link, and this made the owner of that blog think of these two possibilities:
CommentLuv is taking advantage of his blog and displaying ad links instead of his blog links!
CommentLuv sever is being exploited to change the link
And the interesting thing was not in the post it self, it was in the comments on that post, it was the only place on the internet to find an answer of Latief’s question about the error he keep getting when he comment on CommentLuv enabled blogs which is “bad juju just happened”, and I found an expected answer as this maybe a server error reflect this message to the user. This is why I always talk about paying attention to blog comments, it is the meat of the bone, and has the real butter of the post sometimes!
So.. anyways,we are now talking about the bad behavior and strange links in CommentLuv that could happen while commenting (This never happen with me personally before) and what if CommentLuv is making money from showing different links instead of the original feed links that it has to show (and I don’t think this something Andy would do)!
And because I can not and I don’t have an answer to this question, I thought to ask Andy to give us a short statement about CommentLuv and ComLuv and make things clear to all bloggers. So I had three question to ask him and he was kind enough to answer them. So let’s see what Andy have told to us!
Hey Andy, I have sent you the link of the post on the non-English (Vietnamese) blog that tells about the CommentLuv server issue and the errors that happen, there no better way but to ask the person who is in charge and behind CommentLuv, so what you can tell us about it?
First things first, the Vietnamese site post. I translated it with Google and I can see exactly what went on.
This was happening around the time the server was having real trouble with the amount of requests it was receiving. Every time a blog with CommentLuv on it gets spammed, it means my server has to try and find the feed at every site submitted on the spam comments and nearly all of them didn’t have feeds which triples the work the server tries to do.
When there’s a thousand comments a minute coming in, well, the server decided to give up and sulk in the corner. It did this 3 times before I managed to put some caching in the API so it sends back the last result if a new request is made within the cache time. problem solved! ….. not quite. It was working really well but only for registered members.
The way the API did it was see the URL being requested and on what page. I get the member number from the URL and search the db for that member and send back their cached result. Thing is, I forgot about non members! so it was searching for a non member id of -1 and sending back the result from whichever non member commented last when a new comment from a non member gets made.
It was first brought to my attention by @nodinsnest
Luckily, because I’m a twitter freak with it open on every device I use, I was notified very early that it was happening and was able to fix it pretty quickly..
Commentluv should be fixed now. can you try it?
It’s all working now and I am happy to say that my changes means the ComLuv server has stayed up for the whole week and has around 2/3 less cpu usage. Commentluv for all! (except for a few who were commenting during the change)
Good to see that you are interacting with feedback by yourself and paying full attention to everyone who contact you, I am sure this is not an easy job! I have a few related questions to ask you, Is CommentLuv taking away the love?
Not at all!
I was just making sure spammers don’t take away everyone’s luv
Well, spammers are everywhere and it’s hard sometimes to deal with their attacks, I hope you are ready always for them. One more important question Andy, is CommentLuv taking advantage of our blogs?
It’s not in my mission statement. That’s more like ‘write code write code WRITE CODE!’
Sometimes the code I write has unexpected results which were never intended but experiencing that and fixing them is how software gets improved and updated. (especially mine! lol, I’m a self taught coder so my mistakes sometimes teach me more than if everything goes right first time)
Is CommentLuv Making any Money from your blog? or selling premium features and other options that you provide to make money from?
Nope. not yet.
Every month the server, management fees, premium features and Amazon S3 bandwidth cost me money.
Real money from my pocket!!
I see! it’s a project with high expenses, Is CommentLuv selling ad links for advertisers to show instead of the original links in the comments?
I have no monetization plans for peoples links. The whole point of the plugin is to provide links to the comment authors site so everyone else can see what they write about. If the link wasn’t theirs, it’d be just another kontera type link which would need a squillion clicks before it made any money and no one would click anyone’s links if they thought they might be ads.
Hope this clears things up, the screen shots of the links on the Viet site show dates and times similar to the tweets notifying me about it so I think it’s safe to say that they were both talking about the same thing.
One more thing, the cache. It saves your last post for 24 hours if you’re a non member so if people aren’t seeing their very latest post they need to check the pull down box to see when CommentLuv api renews it.
As a registered member, your cache reduces to 1 hour and you get 10 posts from your site to choose from. Plus, you get to buy additional urls and default links if you’re a registered member.
I understand now it depends on the system cash and time the feed takes to be updated, now I see another importance for registering our blogs to ComentLuv, this makes a lot of sense. Another important question, can someone exploited CommentLuv server and override the links?
Only javascript stored on the same server as the blog would have any potential to hijack the links and that would have to be installed by the blog owner and have to be written specifically to modify the CommentLuv script. I wont give details of course 🙂
LOL! of course! OK, here is my last question Andy, what is the meaning of “bad juju just happened” message? it happen sometimes while someone trying to add a comment to a CommenLuv enabled blog!
Bad juju happens when the URL being requested results in a feed error 3 times. The server was dealing with nearly half a million error or non existent feeds a week and I had to put in the bad juju bit to keep the server alive. It’s very simple to fix, just visit Comluv unpan URL page and enter your site URL to clear the juju.
If you’re a registered member, you can specify your exact feed url so it will help to prevent this from happening.
Thank you a lot Andy for your time, this should clear things for everybody so far! And now we know why someone is getting a bad juju and how to clear the juju 🙂
Thank you for reading everybody, Follow Andy on Twitter, and tell him about anything you might experience with CommentLuv because feedback is so very important to him as a project owner even more than to you, and this will help him to solve problems faster and support this great plugin, so Don’t forget to follow Andy on Twitter @CommentLuv and us @FamousBloggers to keep updated and and be in touch.
