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Comment by maxklein | Hacker News Reader

It's a good idea and will be successful with very little effort. But you NEED to make the comments possible without signing up for the first few weeks, you'd have made me bookmark it if I had been able to leave a comment Because I'd have been curious to go back and reply. But no, I could not comment, could not be bothered to sign up and so moved on

Comments open for a few weeks, spam on yahoo answers and fluther and in a few weeks you'll have a big site. Send me a thank you note then.

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I'm the co-Founder and CEO of Fluther; please don't spam our site. We have a dedicated group of volunteer moderators that remove spam, so it will be a waste of your time.

My honest advice on building a real community: it takes a lot of work, love, and time to incubate. There is no shortcut. Get your friends using it. Add good users one at a time. Make sure it works with for small group, and just keep building.

If you had come and said something like:

"No need to link to your site from our site, I'll help you out and put a link for you for a few weeks", my respect for you would have been massive. And out of gratitude, the guy would probably have linked to you for the rest of the lifetime of his site.

Instead you land like a splash of cold water in the face. You have already forgotten the feeling of being little.

Great point and something I've considered doing but it's not in the pligg setup config, so I'll have to dig into the code to make it happen. (i'm a designer but I know a little PHP)

Since you've confirmed this notion, I'll make it a high priority to get it done before we start marketing it. I don't really like the idea of "spamming" though.

Thanks for feedback!

I've found Mollom http://www.mollom.com very effective at preventing spam. It was super easy to add as I was already using Drupal. But it will be more work to add to pligg. Maybe it would be less work to convert to using drupal/drigg http://www.drigg-code.org ?

Here ya go:

http://forums.pligg.com/8774-post16.html

http://forums.pligg.com/pligg-mods/6844-setting-anonymous-co...

It will take a while before the spammers find you. When they find you, start working on that problem, till then, handle your more pressing problem of gaining users.

If you go to Yahoo Answers and point to a relevant link on your own site to the question being asked, I think this qualifies as marketing, no longer spam.

In any case, realise this:

The users of fluther and Yahoo Answers are your CORE audience. You may also take a look at the ask.metafilter.com users - if you sign up for a $5 account, you can post a link to your site under the "Projects" section. You'll get about 200-400 hits, but it's a relevant audience.

Otherwise, you'll have to use a gimmick. This is not ethical, but if you are interested in relevant traffic, then do this:

Post a troll. Target this troll towards christian fundamentalists, teenage girls, or housewives. Then visit a site where these groups are, like a christian forum, a youtube posting of Avril Lavigne or an advice site like flylady. Link to this troll of yours, and watch them get in a hullaboo about it and create links everywhere.

For example, you could write:

"My girlfriend just admitted to me that when Snoop Dogg was in town, she slept with one of his bodyguards. Should I break up with her?"

"My wife has herpes, and our gardener also has herpes. Is she cheating?"

"My sons girlfriend is 14 and he is 18. Is this legal?"

That's linkbait, but you need to target it correctly. The jaded crowd here will immediately see through that, but the groups I mentioned above will believe it immediately.

Yes, unethical I know, but it's just ideas. Pick and mix as you wish.

Great thanks! I found those same threads shortly after your first post and have an email out to someone that has supposedly authored a mod for version 9.x to handle the anonymous commenting.

Will take some of your advice on marketing the site next week, after addressing feedback from HN and making some last minute changes.

I like the open comments idea - what do you think is a good way is to stop the inevitable spammers that come with openness though?

I'd think it would work this way:

1. Use a commenting system that is a bit different from the standard, so the bots can't use it. Wordpress comments already is well known by the bots, so it has to be a bit different 2. When the spammers figure out how to do it, or do it manually, one just has to delete for a few weeks manually 3. When enough users are on the site, one can then make the comments sign-up only.

But in my experience, if you write a custom comment field (or change the IDs), the spammers don't come for a very long time. It's always just bots who monitor RSS feeds broadcasters.

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