I was reading a blog today, had an interesting post I was going to comment on. I will out the comment section, clicked submit and “You need to be logged into Comment”. Okay…

First it was odd that the form was wide open, usually it will say you need to register to comment. Even still there was no remark that registration was needed.

So I didn’t comment. I didn’t feel like going through the process. You could call it being lazy. I didn’t want to spend the time to fill out the form, then I might have to confirm, ect. Too much hassle.

I can’t say i was lost as a reader, or this blog will lose other readers because of the comments set-up, but I don’t know if I’ll be back. A powerful tactic of any blog is the power of comments and building a community, creating some interaction.

If I was able to comment easily, there would have been a higher probability I would have returned, or keep up on the post and other comments, by commenting i would have become a part of the thread, i would have been interacting.

How many forum posts do you make or reply to, and not go back to keep up with the thread? Not many I’ll bet. It’s like a burning urge, you have to keep checking, see the replies, see if you can add more. Why should a blog be any different?

I can completely understand, wanting to curb or stop spam. Back in the day I had blogs that were getting 1,000’s of spam comments a day, it was bad. Things have improved since there, by a wide margin. There are a few things you can put into place, frankly I’m shocked many blog owners do not use them.

If you want to have comments open, which you should, you should try out Math Comment Spam Protection. Real simple, it asks you to solve a simple math question before your comment will be taken. Nice and easy.

I know there are many image verification plug-ins, usually captcha, but bots can read them and frankly I have a hard time reading half of them myself. Am I the only one?

Seems in an attempt to keep spam bots from reading captcha, they are making them just as difficult for humans to read..:)

So, my tiny rant for the day… make it easy for your readers to leave comments. If your worried about spam, check out the math thing above, it works very good.



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