Bloggers–Don’t Make It Hard to Comment

Posted on by SQLAndy

Lately I’ve hit a couple blogs that wanted me to enter some kind of credentials before I could post a comment. On my laptop that’s fine, I have the credentials stored and available, but on a different machine I rarely can remember them. Most blogs also have the option to just enter an email address and a name, but these didn’t – and so they didn’t get my comment.

Comments are hard to come by. It takes precious little to have someone – me at least – decide it’s too much effort. Let Askimet spot the spam, or enable moderation, but don’t get so caught up in spam that you put up barriers to your readers.

3 thoughts on “Bloggers–Don’t Make It Hard to Comment”

  1. I was vehemently anti-moderation for a long time, having blogged mostly on sqlblog.com for 6 years. When SQL Sentry started our new blog at http://sqlperformance.com/ we were literally barraged with spam almost immediately, and stuff was getting past Akismet – I guess this is the type and volume of exploits that WordPress attracts vs. Community Server.

    So we quickly enabled the setting that requires a commenter to be approved one time, then after that their comments are allowed to flow freely. This doesn””””t really impact any commenter except, the first time, they won””””t see their comment appear until one of us approves it. I think this strikes a good balance and only stands to be a real burden for anyone in the event of a perfect storm – a timely comment gets delayed because a first-time commenter comes in at a time when we””””re all on vacation simultaneously. In reality we monitor pretty continuously between us and the chance that a comment sits waiting for approval for an unacceptable time period is very small.

    I totally agree about credentials. I should be able to comment on a blog without having to authenticate with some 3rd party or having to prove I am who I say I am. If I want my e-mail address for a particular comment to be thelorax@drseuss.com, why can””””t I?

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  2. I agree. If I have to sign-up/login to leave a simple comment then I don”t bother. When I started blogging I started to get more and more spam through and as time went on, I found that the akismet feature in Orchard CMS just wasn”t working as well as I wanted it to. Plus I wanted comments to be automatically approved without always moderating them first. So I implemented a very simple (and readable!) recaptcha type system within the comments form on my blog and immediately ever since then the spam has pretty much all gone away.

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  3. I agree with you Andy. A trend that I see is that web sites now use Facebook for their comments. If you don”t have a Facebook account, you don”t get to comment. As one of the 15 people who don”t have (and don”t plan on getting) a Facebook account, that leaves me out.

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