The vouch parameter is a third URL to help the target determine whether or not they should accept the webmention. This should block automated spam and aid in moderation.
Several people have implemented receiving vouches. It is relatively easy to look at a vouch URL and see if it links to a third-party who you have approved of in the past. While there are more advanced things you can do, that is the basic summary of the protocol.
The harder part, and less implemented by others is sending of vouches. Where do you find people who have been approved by people you have approved of? It would really help if we had some more discussion on this.
So, at the Indieweb Summit, we talked about this a bit, after which I implemented a primitive Vouch receiver. My solution was to use a manually curated domain whitelist that I’d previously built as my source for acceptable domains.
There are some suggestions on where to get this list. Several people generate a list from referrers. This sent me down the road of looking as to whether I’d want to implement refbacks to add more mentions to my website…except there is a lot of noise. Refbacks are basically the same as webmentions, except the source is gleaned from the referrer header that sites send when a page is accessed.
Even if I have a list of sites that I approve of, I would have to crawl them to find links from them to other sites. So, I think we should all help each other out on this.
That means we need to post our list of approved domains somewhere on our site. That used to be quite popular. It was called a Blogroll. It was sites you read, followed, or recommended. There are other terms for it. But, this is a perfect place to get a nice list, and if we publish them, then we can help the Vouch cause.
But the problem is, how do you tell a Vouch receiver where your list is. There are some brainstorming items about blogrolls and following/follower lists
- Follower lists marked up with rel=”follower” or rel=”following”
- Contact lists marked up with rel=”contact”
- Follow Posts marked up with u-follow-of
Follow posts would create an h-feed of follow posts that could be used to generate a list. You can have a specific page on your website, but there isn’t a way to indicate this to someone looking for it.
There is rel-directory, which is the reverse direction. It indicates that the link is to a directory in which the current page is listed. What we seem to be missing is a property that says that a page is a feed of followers that can be placed inside an h-card or on a home page.
u-follow-of is a proposed property that indicates that an h-entry is considered a follow post, which is a post indicating you have followed someone, then a feed of follow posts could be parsed and read by a reader. If you add in the XFN relationships to that, you can build even more detail.
The reverse relationship would, in theory, be u-follow, which would be a URL to the follow post of the current URL(the thing being followed).
Feeds are identicated by rel=”feed” to link from your homepage to those feeds. But there is a lack of indicating what type of feed it is, such as rel=”blogroll” or rel=”following”. I’m not sure, and need more discussion about what to use for this.
But, this has the ability to solve a lot of problems. Imagine I…
- Post Follow posts when I follow someone
- Use this to generate a blogroll/followers list
- Send webmentions when I follow someone so they can build relationships
- Use that list as a vouch list. Use other people’s blogrolls/followers lists as a means to generate vouch lists…which reduces the implementation cost of Vouch.
Needs work, but suddenly I want to do Follow posts.
Read Brainstorming on Implementing Vouch, Following and Blogrolls by David Shanske (David Shanske)
I like the sound of where this is going already! All these small little pieces loosely joined to build a much larger edifice is certainly interesting.
I’ve got a somewhat reasonable bookmarklet for quickly following people, though it’s not marked up with XFN data (yet) — perhaps another data field for Post Kinds? I do wish that there was either a mechanism for adding those to my Following page via the WordPress Link Manager or someone had a means of parsing lots of follow posts so I could quickly have data for both Vouch as well as for microsub readers either via my follow feed list or via OPML export and/or OPML subscription. WordPress obviously has some of the infrastructure built already, but there’s certainly a more IndieWeb way of doing it that wouldn’t require side-files like OPML.
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Very interesting! This is timely considering all the reader stuff is taking off. It would make it a lot easier to post follow posts if the readers (which already send Micropub posts) created them when we started following a new feed (with our permission, of course). Looking forward to following and speaking into the development of this!
David Shanske wrote about a brainstorming session held at Indieweb Summit 2018 about implementing “Vouch” – a trust/anti-spam extension for webmention.
The idea of Vouch is that people create a list of webmention senders they trust and make this available to others. If a domain is in a published trusted list then it has been “vouched for” meaning it’s safe to accept and approve webmentions from that domain.
As David says “This should block automated spam and aid in moderation.”
But, problem is, “(w)here do you find people who have been approved by people you have approved of?” How do we build lists and share them? Can a blogroll be such a list?
Various ideas were proposed including using a
relvalue such as follower, following or contact, or maybe using microformats markup to declareu-follow-ofentries in a h-feed.Now, the issue with a blogroll is that, unless it’s explicitly curated, its member sites may well not be configured to send webmentions and it might be a bit of a waste.
As such, I thought my /Directory could be an ideal place to hold such a list. It is automated, only includes sites that have sent webmentions and only shows those that I approve – I’ve not had webmention spam but any would be removed from comments and not appear in the directory.
I’ve laid the groundwork by adding a h-feed and
u-follow-ofmarkup to the Directory plugin (subject to tweaking but it’s a start) so we now need the missing link of telling other sites where your list is.When I read Shanske’s post, I really liked the idea, but was concerned about having an old-school blogroll. Of course this may have been misreading it.
A few years back I had a go at organising my blogroll using Sheets and representing it dynamically. The problem with this is that there is not much I can do with it and it is tedious to maintain, especially as my current workflow involves updating two spaces.
I really like your idea about having a ‘directory’. This reminds me of Chris Aldrich’s following lists. Like Aldrich, I just wish there was an easier way of adding a link/site and having this automagically added to the page. I assume that in part that is what you have?
Replied to No Good WordPress Blogroll Plugins by Brad Enslen (Brad Enslen)
Apologies Brad. I just saw your follow up post and had meant to reply to your earlier one when I saw it last week, I just didn’t have the time to write a quick response. I had hoped you might have found something even better than what I’ve put together previously or perhaps started building a newer and shinier edifice.
There is actually an excellent and solid “plugin” for creating a blogroll, but it’s actually been hiding in WordPress core for ages: the original Link Manager. Use of it declined so much it was programatically “removed”, but all the code is still in core, it still works wonderfully, and it only requires a single line of code (or the simplest plugin ever written) to re-enable it.
It was very solid and didn’t need much iteration, so it should work fine with current versions of WordPress–it certainly does on mine.
I’ve written up a bunch of details on how and what I did (as well as why), so hopefully it’ll give you a solid start including some custom code snippets and reasonably explicit directions to make some small improvements for those that may be a bit code-averse. Hint: I changed it from being a sidebar widget to making it a full page. Let us know if you need help making some of the small code related changes to get yourself sorted.
Even if you just want a plug and play plugin, there are details for that in the post as well, you’ll just be stuck with putting the blogroll into a traditional sidebar position. (With conditional statements in the sidebar widget, you could restrict the blogroll widget to only displaying on a “Following” page, for example.)
I do think there is still a more IndieWeb way of doing this, potentially by making follow posts with mark up that could be parsed by microsub readers perhaps? Certainly dovetailing something with microsub seems to be a laudable goal. I would like to eventually dive into the Link Manager code and add some additional microformats as well as update the OPML to v2, but there’s enough back compatibility that the older version is fine for most use cases I’ve run across. I know David Shanske has some ideas about some changes he’d like to see in the future as well. You could always also go super low tech the way Greg did and have a blogroll post that you update over time, though perhaps a page is a better way to go? Updating things to be more automated is certainly a reasonable goal though.
Give it a spin and see what you think. Here’s my Following page (aka blogroll) with details at the very bottom for subcategories of OPML subscription. I’ll try to update the IndieWeb blogroll page with some of these details to make them more imminently findable as well.
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In this episode, Chris and I recap our takeaways and stories from the Indieweb Summit 2018 last month in Portland, Oregon, discuss Microsub, Vouch, and other ideas.
Vouch
Brainstorming on Implementing Vouch, Following, and Blogrolls – David Shanske
Refbacks
The Year of the Reader
Granary
Microsub
Indiewebring
Sending Your First Webmention – Aaron Parecki
OAuth for the Open Web – Aaron Parecki
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Episode 8: InterfluxIf possible, click to play, otherwise your browser may be unable to play this audio file.Running time: 1h 23m 35s | Download (26.2 MB) | Subscribe by RSS
Summary: David Shanske and I recap the recent IndieWeb Summit 2018 in Portland Oregon including recent developments like microsub, readers, Vouch, and even the comeback of webrings!
Huffduff this Episode
Shownotes
Recap of IndieWeb Summit 2018
Vouch(? 00:7:13)
Plugin for WordPress (pull request pending)
David’s Post about Brainstorming on Implementing Vouch, Following and Blogrolls
Refbacks (? 00:12:26)
Why Refback Still Matters
Plugin for WordPress (GitHub)
Colin Walker mini-plugins (? 00:22:44)
Micropub plugin for WordPress (? 00:23:28)
Post Kinds, Micropub, and rendering (? 00:28:30)
The Year of the Reader (? 00:38:32)
Granary
Gordon Korman – Son of Interflux (? 00:49:00)
Microsub
Server
Clients
Gregor Morrill’s IndieBookClub.biz (? 00:57:47)
Webrings (? 00:59:03)
Indiewebring
WordPress webring
Aaron Parecki posts (? 1:12:10)
Sending Your First Webmention
OAuth for the Open Web
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This Article was mentioned on indiewebcamp.com
This Article was mentioned on indiewebcamp.com
This Article was mentioned on indiewebcamp.com
The Vouch protocol is an anti-spam extension to Webmention. Webmention with Vouch depends on understanding Webmention.