Huge congrats goes out to this month’s Top Spammers Commentators. You guys (and girls) are the driving force behind this blog!
For your reward, each one of you will be receiving a set of John Chow dot Com and 1234Pens.com pens.
To prevent some evil person from trying to claim your prize by pretending to be you, I will be sending each winner an email asking for your shipping information. Reply to that email. Please do not email me.
Changes To The Top Commentators
Starting in March, the Top Commentator list will be reset every week. This will give readers who come in mid-month a chance to make the list without having to wait for the month to be over. I really don’t expect the names on the list to change by that much.
*Update – I have just reset the Top Commentators to weekly.
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sounds good!
Ooohhhh. I think it’s time to gun for the top spa…errr commentator spot!
congratulations to the “winners”
As for the Top Commentator list being reset every week, I don’t think I’ll hit the top ten again
That should be easier, just drop all articles in a virtual queue till the beginning of the week?
You have certainly done a good work by posting some 30 comments in less than 3 hours and getting me off that list..
Nice job(?),
Allen.H
Wow 30 comments in 3 hours? That’s a bit much.
All I can say is …wow!
Allen, that’s bullocks, I only posted about 3 times this morning so I suppose John’s plugin was messed – it wasn’t even showing up this morning. Thanks for the accusations though.
Actually, 30 comments in three hours isn’t that much if you haven’t been on the site for a while and are replying to a lot of other comments…
Says twenty five now. That’s a lot of comments still, that much is for certain.
If you can’t keep up with the high comment energy here then I’m sure there are other blogs where your 1 comment/day average will make you a superstar.
This blog is like the Walmart of blog comments: volume is king.
You might be right, however, I doubt these statistics were really reset; I haven’t made up to 40 comments today, I doubt I even made that many in a week – I suppose it’s simply counting from 2 weeks back.
Quoted from John below:-
“*Update – I have just reset the Top Commentators to weekly. This is why you may noticed a change in the ranking. We are now in mid-week.”
Yes, you are right.
Ive made over 30 comments in an hour today, Ive been a reader for a while and commented here and there, for a long time Ive been curious as to what a link in top commentors is worth in terms of traffic, so Im gonna give it a shot for a week or so.
Its just a shame the blog im linking to is in a bit of a state, I should really be focusing on posting, not commenting here, but its fun reading what you people all think, not a chore….
How I agree to this – I waited till end of Feb simply to get back on the top commentators list … Its next to impossible to catch up if you miss out in the first few days – weekly or fortnightly reset is must.
Exactly, I usually missed the start of the month and never bothered, doing it like this will encourage more people to give it a go
Thanks Jonix. It’s really not that hard to get on the list. And I’m sure with the weekly system John is now instituting, it will allow more more opportunity for others to join in the fun.
Right! This morning, the top commentator only had 11 comments, not the top commentator has 69!
That’s a lot of comments!
Congrats to the winners.
Hey John…how about some gadgets for your top 1 or 2 commentators? Maybe we can work on this with you.
That’s when pure spam would be rolling in, I really don’t think this is a good idea. Although I assume you aren’t serious too serious about it
Allen.H
Yeah right – especially if it was a weekly contest!
Usually, and in fact all of the spam that I received on my blog are computer generated so far.
No, in fact i think is to keep the ‘gadgets’ out. Comments should be on quality over quantity, yea?
The only problem with quality of quantity is how do you judge quality? With the plugin that is being used, all it does is count NUMBER of comments, not really the quality of those comments.
It seems to me like everyone’s comments on this site are actually pretty good. People don’t really try to self promote, which is a good thing. Everyone kind of just says what they think, and that’s what we want to read.
We are not talking about that kind of spam! We are talking about comments like:
Great!
Me too!
Yeah!
Generic comments that are made only for a +1
Yeah I would have thought so, but then the idea behind a top commentors list is to encourage more comments is it not???
definitally a great idea, nice pens also
Come on guys don’t do this – A link on the JohnChow.com is much more valuable for you as a blogger than a small gift.
I think working towards links is much better than simply commenting for gifts
Yup, I want to know what one of those links delivers in terms of traffic.
The paid links above are not cheap, ok commentors are underneath, but I tend to want to see other readers blogs rather than the paid add’s, I regularly visit the top commentors blogs….
Sounds good I might have a try at making it this time.
Yeah its fun if you have an hour or two to spare
Ill give this month a shot perhaps, I can stay in the top for a week.
Congrats to those commentators that can put out a huge amount of suggestions and comments all the time.
Way to go spammers !!
Spammers? That’s quite the generalization… Somebody’s jealous it seems.
I am. I want a pen.
I just want the ‘love’ from when John spams technorati again!
You mean being in the top 20k isn’t good enough for you?
The “ping” made it look like a unique blog to Technorati.
I know! I’m in the top 15K now!!!
I hear you Steve…I’m right there with you!
Nice Steve, you beat me with that, I’m ‘just’ in the 21k right now
So when will TLA start allowing us to sell links for $250?
Yeah, my rank jumped from 159,432 to 73,706 over night!
Welcome to the club Saman! it’s a great place to be and learn!
Thanks Jane, it really is!
I really have learned a lot in my short time here! There is a great community here too!
Don’t worry Derrich, I’ll likely be creating a contest on my blog once I get my Chow pens. They’re apparently a hot commodity, so I’ll help to spread some love.
Beautiful, Marc. Keep me posted. I’m all over that!
Are you giving away the pen you won?!
142 comments by a single person in a blog! WTF!!!
I had more than that when John first fired up the top commentator plugin!
That’s just in one month! But there are a lot of comments to reply to!
Me too..
Yep, you see if it’s a component of your traffic development strategy, the time investment can have some great ROI.
Commenting on the article, commenting on other comments, and so on got him pretty far I guess.
Have you seen the Top Commentators list TODAY (03/01)? That record will be broken by tonight…and so will John’s server. Probably.
Thanks for allowing me to spam your blog ánd get rewarded John
Anyway, it’s a smart move to reset it more often, more people will get a chance that way.
Yeah, I never thought I would get rewarded for spamming, but look at the results, I got free pens
Actually I think Nomar does the best job of this out of everyone.
“hi nice post
”
or something everytime.
But Nomar has not been able to profit on his spamming.
I’m sure he’s seen *some* improvement in traffic. Heck, it’s because he’s always around that I found myself at his blog.
Whereas I have
Trust me, it’s not easy to stay ahead of the Nomar “hi nice post
” count and try to make useful contributions. But I try my best 
Interestingly, of course it would be hard to go against something of that nature. That is, if one wants to add in value to the content and discussion as well.
You can call it – ‘actively’ staying tuned to JohnChow then.
I like this one, the word “active” leads me to believe there is something positive about spamming…I like it a lot!
No, hopefully it is not termed as ‘spam’. It is a rather crude word to use for active commenting.
Spamming is never ‘positive’, for sure.
I know lyndon, I was just pulling your leg a lil.
Yea, you almost did, didn’t you?
Yeah, I’m looking forward to my pen too
You forgot the traffic from the site which is also a gift for your spamming !
“Yeah, I never thought I would get rewarded for spamming, but look at the results, I got free pens”
I take it they work ok, hope im not wasting my time here
Excellent change to the top commentators. It should result in less comment spam and newer groups of people contributing to the blog. Of course, there will be the die-hards out there that will continue to be the top commentators
John: Ever consider adding the do-follow plugin to your blog? Curious about your thoughts on this plugin.
On a site with such high traffic you’d be asking for trouble. I think John’s got just the right balance at the moment to avoid spammers and junk comments.
Yeah, having the list reset weekly will have a lot of people fighting for the top spots! I can only see there being a lot of comments like:
Yeah!
Me too!
Great!
Hopefully, there isn’t such nonsense or rubbish in the postings. At the very least, we can keep it conversational.
“Yeah, having the list reset weekly will have a lot of people fighting for the top spots! I can only see there being a lot of comments like:
Yeah!
Me too!
Great!”
Indeed
Not any more trouble than he already has. The nofollow tag has no influence on spam anymore (questionable as to whether or not it ever did). I’m a supporter of the do-follow plugin personally and think it should be adopted throughout the blogosphere. We’re fighting spam with the right tools now like spam filters. The no-follows were a stop-gap measure when they came out and they failed to stop the gap…
Yeah its a bit of a shame that the no follow came into play, running Akismet does a great job, there are other things you can put on as well. I dont really think the no follow makes much difference.
A lot of spam is posted by bots, so there is zero effort in doing it (for spammers) its obviously worth their while just for clicks, regardless of whether its a follow link or not.
Congrats to all the top ten.
Also, resetting the numbers every week will allow for the possibility of different people to be in the top ten, but harder to run contests for just a week.
There are some pretty prolific commenters on this site. Good work guys.
Thanks Dan for your observation – we will definitely continue commenting
Thanks John. I was surprised at how quick you contacted us for delivery info. Am I going to have anything extra included in my package John
I think Jane wants that ipod accessory we saw earlier this week
Lol Gary, of course, what else could we be left to believe?
In my opinion, that would be a pretty ‘misfit’ gift to give out, wouldn’t it? Though there might be interested contenders for it. Gosh!
This is true, I wonder if John has given it a test run yet? Nothing wrong with wanting to “hear some music”
I’ll be he’s pluged it in – but I doubt he’s done a full test run – yet
Misfit? All a matter of perspective I suppose… You’re talking about a guy who starts rock fights you know…
I also want Jane to get the iPod accessory
Oh man, just imagine the traffic her site would get!
*imagining* …the traffic too, of course.
I take that as a “YES” to the review request of the OhMiBod
Congrats to all the spammers!
Thanks again
Nomar, I love you
You’re the toughest guy to beat out in this game 
Not if I have anything to do with it.
Hmm I think I’ve found a bug with the top commentators plugin. I’m on the list but it’s showing someone elses site. I guess its not checking for duplicate names or double checking against the email address.
Same thing happened to me, I had to start using my last name so that it would read my new site…my old site would appear after entering only “Jane”
Was having the same problem with my comments that I used to leave in Jan were visible. But luckily I see that the problem has been now resolved and am back with my name pointing to the right blog !
This is really good !! I need pens
Honestly, the linkback is way for valuable!
Yeah, I actually wrote a post about that a while ago. For those who prefer pens to backlink though I’ll be helping them out shortly
Are you really going to eBay your pen?!
Hey dude you can get more pens from John by the
Hi Nice post strategy.
And may be you can start a shop with Pen’s for Spammers
It’s hard to compete with all these John Chow “comment whores!”
HEY! OK, you’re right.
Clan Of Evil right here baby!
We learn from the best!
I hope your not insisting that is me!
Interesting idea to get your readers ‘hooked’ onto reading. haha.. Any new ideas besides the pens?
Does this mean you will be giving out weekly prizes!!!
Well, it is a reward for staying tuned, I guess, but John will be broke from this. Staying the way it is, is the best for now.
The reward is the linkback!
Congrats winners! I like samanathon.com except my brain didn’t want to process the name! I kept wanting to think Samantha.
Very cool site though.
Thanks Courtney, I get that a lot!
I have this on my about page:
The nickname Samanathon was given to me by my good friend Bobs. It’s a take on my real name, Saman, which is pronounced: Some-on.
So Samanathon would be pronounced: Some-on-a-thon. It’s kind of like Toyotaton, but with less cars and more me.
Yay! Thanks John! Will send you an e-mail when I get home this afternoon, don’t really have time now.
Oooooh!!! What do the bottom commentators get?? Used OhMiBod?
Kumiko
xo
HA you want to do the review deep inside, dont’ you???
LOL…oh my, I hope not
*gag*
That’s nasty!
Shoemoney also implemented a top commentators section lately, I guess its a trend! Any feedback on the comment boost John?
I guess it would be the top-notch bloggers trend to impose such a feature to keep track of fans/ faithful followers of what they write.
Shoemoney is another example. As a blogger, would you not want to do that as well?
I absolutely believe that in endorses comments on your site because of the payoff for the top commentators! The linkback is very valuble – especially for someone who is just starting out!
Completely agree this is greatly beneficial if you are starting to blog
Most of those using wordpress are using that plugin. It makes the reader coment on the blog. I have seen it on a large no of blogs this week
Last I checked, I was on Shoe’s list…with like 7 comments. Definitely not as spammy as John’s.
A lot of the comments are pretty spammy.
So instead of receiving decent feedback you tend to get people commenting for the sake of it
[mentioning no names]
They probably don’t realise that if they spent as much time working on their blog as they do commenting they’d gain more incoming links. Beats spend all day on a blog posting comments to receive a link in a sidebar – and a pen
Great point (as long you weren’t not mentioning my name)! I totally agree. I’d hate to see somebody who did 200 “LOL”s be the top commentator. Somebody needs to write a plug-in that rates quality over quantity.
Kumiko
I agree. Of course the most important focus is on what you are suppose to do – your blog. Definitely, there will be a trade-off, but it is one way to grab attention from your audience by offering incentives.
No right or wrong, I believe, so long as the right words are kept.
Well, you have to weigh the pros and cons…Me for example, love John’s site, and have built some great relationships with others here. So what appears to be spam, might be interacting with other readers.
That’s a good point Jane. I try to never leave a one-word comment, I try to contribute to the conversation!
Absolutely right point. I have really built some contacts that might prove to be helpful for my blog
John – Would you have an ‘evil’ way to take benefit of that also ?
Wise step with reducing the resest time.
Allen.H
Thanks for the change from monthly to weekly.
Congratulations guys.. I’m still waiting for my pens to arrive so I can’t comment on how good they work!
Did you say penS?
Yeap.. penS! John Chow dot Com and 1234Pens.com pens
I think he thought you are getting more then one pen.
Just curious, are the total number of comments by each person posted somewhere on the blog?
That would be to the discretion of John, of course. No one but himself.
No, he clears them each month, now to be each week.
Not by each person, but only the top 10. You can configure that in the plugin, but he’s sidebar would be a million miles long!
How many posts did the winner have?
The winners posted comments, the #1 commenter had close to 200 comments, the last one on the list had between 177-190, I’m not sure.
Allen.H
Can I just get a pen for emailing you? I’m all out. If not…Hey, Nomar, can I have your pen?
Good call to move to a weekly system. For as much comment traffic as you get now that’s the best way to go.
When will we see the winners auctioning these pens off on eBay?
Congrats to all of the winners. It has been nice to see that most of the comments continue to contain some substance. While there are exceptions, I think it is pretty good overall.
Will there be any, afterall? That would be an interesting article to write on.
It’s just a pen! How much would you bid on one?!
It depends on how much people wants to bid on them, I guess.
Yeah, but it’s a pen!!
I’ll really be shocked if someone bid more then a couple of dollars on a John Chow pen!
wow, so people are commenting like 6 or seven times a day? ridiculous
Perhaps, for one it’s a great way to promote your blog and besides that, John posts quite a lot too, making it quite an easy task to do
Don’t forget there are also tons of people who post on forums ten times every day without any kind of compensation, which isn’t considered ‘weird’ most of the time.
Agreed. But, some forums do you allow you to have sigs, so that can help send some traffic your way. Instant gratification anyone?
That is true. It isn’t unusual to find that in the more popular forums, since people are pretty much spending alot of time online.
Ridiculous? It’s all a matter of what you have to say and how much you want to participate in the community. The community here is great and all of the top commentators except Nomar
have a lot to discuss and make for some interesting comments.
I agree. Who wants to face a dead wall, or audience that never communicate? You never know if they are just another zombie passing by.
Six or seven comments a day is nothing – if you are actually contributing to the conversation!
I reckon most people here like using forums anyway, which is, with threaded comments how this is kinda working….
for sure there are a lot of off-topic comments going on, not sure how much value is added this way
Depends on whose perspective you are talking about: John’s, the readers, or the commenters.
Not really, most of the comments are on topic and there isn’t too much spam – yet!
Does anyone else find that with MyBlogLog and with a ton of comments like there are on this post that its takes a bit to load properly?
I’m on Dual T1 (3MBps up/down) and because the images are resized via HTML it’s just painful sometimes. Well not really painful but more annoying while the comment box scrolls down the page by itself!
Couldn’t they do a resize upon uploading of the image? Geesh in PHP it isn’t hard to do!
Ok that’s the end of my rant
Now.. to get back up there as a top commentor! I need more linkage to my site woo!
Not at all. I’m on a Cable connection and every page loads pretty quickly. Are you caching images?
“Does anyone else find that with MyBlogLog and with a ton of comments like there are on this post that its takes a bit to load properly?”
Yeah pages are taking longer to load, apart from the actual download all those extra DB queries (for the comments) must have an impact too.
Open letter to John Chow readers:
Today, March 1, I declare my intention to crush everyone and rise to the top of the top commenters list. I have comment whoring ability that has been bottled up for some time now, and I will unleash it on you during this month of March, then disapear from the internet… forever.
Cheers,
Roosh
Just noted the weekly system, but I’m still going for the top spot every week on march.
Quite interesting to see someone come up with a diabolical plan to ‘TAKE OVER THE SPAMMING, I mean commenting OF JOHNCHOW.COM!’ Anyways…It’s cool that it is reset every week. I wonder, though, how someone could acquire 25 comments in one day…That’s…interesting.
This is comment 8 and I’m already exhausted. I think I’m going to need another post (and a cup of coffee) to keep the momentum going.
I want my comments to have real substance valued by other readers. I’m not down with “haha” or “i agree” comments.
Your comment skills are lacking!
You are not part of the Clan of Evil yet.
Learn to touch type
What is going to be interesting is to see how John is going to go throught the hundreds of comments that left a guess at his monthly earnings to see who got the closest…that will take quite a while since there are some close guesses.
I agree. Would he have to cut and paste all the figures on an Excel file and sift through them all? It is down to dollars and cents. We should find out soon, tomorrow probably.
I thought the same thing! That’s how I would do it anyway.
My $1 guess was a lock until someone bid $2
I got wedged out on both sides… There are some very narrow gaps… But John’s got a staff now. Make one of the plebes do it
*Update – I have just reset the Top Commentators to weekly. This is why you may noticed a change in the ranking. We are now in mid-week.
I’ve also discovered that you can do a rolling 7 days reset. Comments fall off after 7 days. It just requires using a “7″ in the time operator of the code. That’s how I’ve got mine set up.
That would explain things…I was just about to ask how people got to 60+ posts on the first day!!!
Congrats to the winners, now my turn to be a bigshot
Bring it on Steve!
The Clan of Evil can’t be stopped!
What are the entry requirements to the Evil Clann??
Most of all, I hope the fact that 1234pens.com got some of the best publicity they’ve ever gotten out of a box of pens is not lost in the comment frenzy. Every vendor out there should take note.
If you really want to generate some buzz, send John “King of Contests” Chow buckets of free stuff to give out as prizes. I’m also a great second choice if John’s too busy. You won’t get the full on evil, but I think my evil apprenticeship is coming along nicely.
Well, I can tell you that I haven’t visited their site…
So it’s almost 11am on the 1st of March on the Left Coast and it looks like I’m no longer in the running for Top Commentators with my total of 3 posts this month! I know I have no chance at being a Top Commentator, so I wanted to throw this question out – do you have a minimum word count on comments?
That’s actually a good idea, but as someone alluded to in another comment (I think it was Jane), some of us have developed relationships with other Chow whores. Sometimes a one-word reply is all we need to interact with one another. I guess that’s one of the pitfalls of having this type of threaded comments setup…or pen giveaways.
Right, what if you wanted to ask a question and it was less then the minimum – you wouldn’t get your answer.
Would not mind having a minimum word count to avoid people simply spamming. But on the other side for John it is a good place to build his community so dont see an incentive for him to put a minimum word count
Whats the point in a minimum word count, it will just annoy people, anyway, most of the time taken to comment is finding something to reply to, and waiting for the page to load, not actually writing.
Besides:
Ctrl C + Ctrl V
May be now the Top commentators list is gonna change. By the way how do you chew out so much of posts in a single day John…… I really wonder
How the heck do you people manage to comment fifty times in a DAY!?
They haven’t. Since John set it to weekly, it added any comments that people have had since the start of the week. That’s why there are lots of people with lots of comments.
Wanna bet, Ive managed to pump out 76 at time of writing, an hour or so before work, and 20 mins after work.
If you can type fast its easy peasy.
I wouldnt make a habbit of it, it’s just an experiment for this week to see what that top spot feels like, if I can maintain the pace
I may get bored by the morning
that said, I always spend a bit of time reading comments anyway, so why not reply?
I usually leave a few replies here and there anyway…
Another very interesting question is as to whether any of the new commentators will have any staying power. I recall when the pens were first dangled from a stick there were a lot of people who posted initially but that declined very quickly once people realised the effort required to stay in the top commentators list over the longer term.
Well, I can tell you that I’m not here for the pens – I’m here because of the community and for the great info!
Same here .. But would not mind having the pens though …
Well, if one is commenting for rewards, then he is in the wrong arena. This is one of the few blogs where the audience are not passive, but active.
They did a good job spamming, best of luck to them.
I aim to be top 10 too…
If manage to get a pen this month it will cost you more than the pens worth to ship it
Erhm. Yea, definitely it will.