Here you go, Loretta
Loretta Ng, an Adventus reader, recently posted a request in one of the comments boxes: she wanted to have an easy way to email Adventus articles to others.
Ask, and ye shall receive! While it looks a bit clunky at present, an “email this post” link has been added to articles.
This function existed in the previous version of this blog, but had to be deactivated when we upgraded to a newer version of Wordpress. And then, I forgot about it. Thanks, Loretta, for reminding me!
Hi Fr. Dowd,
Since your visit to Cornwall a few years ago for a presentation to our PLT members, I have been visitng your website. Yesterday I transferred my own site from blogger to wordpress (frbobs.corner.wordpress.com) and it appears that it left two comments (not really comments) on adventus.org. On March 22nd I posted a referral to adventus in a couple of posts, and these now appear as comments on your site. When I tried to use internet explorer to open adventus, it refused because of spam it had left. I then used mozilla and saw the two comments. I’m not sure what happened. Any ideas? I really don’t want to be perceived as a spammer and have people annoyed at me. I hope this is the only case of this happening.
Sorry for the problem I seem to have created. Fr. Bob MacDonald
Hi Fr. Bob,
Wordpress uses the “pingback” and “trackback” features, such that if you link to another blog from yours the system will try and notify the other blog that you did so. When you switched to Wordpress, it likely automatically send out lots of these pingback and trackback notices.
These systems were designed to help keep statistics of who was linking to your blog, as well as all for tracking of “conversations” between blogs. Unfortunately, the standards were not very well written, and they become open doors to comment spam.
Many blogs have installed anti-spam software to try and fight this. What happens now is this: if a blog receives too many trackbacks all at once from a single source, it assumes it must be a program and not a person generating the trackbacks, and flags the source as a comment spammer.
This is likely what happened to you. You switched blogs, it send out lots of trackbacks all at once, and you got automatically flagged as a spammer.
At any rate, you have not caused any problems at all. As you can see, your comments did get through, and thanks to that I have now discovered *your* blog! So don’t sweat it.
Finally, if you *don’t* want your blog sending out trackbacks anymore, just uncheck this box in Options >> Discussion: “Attempt to notify any Weblogs linked to from the article (slows down posting.)”