In the last 24 hours, there have been 5 different blogs to which I would have left comments but they required me creating a username and passwords. Friends, I want to interact and be part of a community but it is ridiculous to expect anyone to keep up with passwords across umpty-ump weblogs. I understand that comment spam is hammering everyone, and I presume this is why people do that. This seems like the wrong solution to me, though, because it has the net effect of driving me away from leaving comments on blogs to which I was interested enough to want to comment.
Katie, Bar the Door
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yeah, i feel your pain Dave… blogger, for one, requires commenters to be members, by default. it sux!
yup, have noticed that too recently…
sometimes these sites that require registration, will let you trackback, i suppose because it’s pretty traceable – but not all comments make sense as trackbacks…
their lose i guess 😉
I’m running into the same thing, particularly with Blogger sites. At the same time, I’m getting so much comment spam on my blog that I am considering removing my comments form entirely and requiring people to use trackbacks if they want to comment on a post . . . but this cuts out people who don’t use Blosxom’s Autotrack plugin or Movable Type. If only the writebackplus comment required an email address and sent an approval request to the originating email which then tied in to procmail or something before it posted a comment.
Jonah, I wrote about what I do to fight the spam here. I adopted the hacks that allow Blosxom users to use the same comment spam blacklist from the Movable Type world here. Via a cron job, my blacklist gets automatically updated. The rejection is based not on where it is coming from but what it contains. I can’t give you an example, because if I do my comment will be rejected! It works really well, and at least for Blosxom users there is a great tool referenced in the post above for cleaning up the writeback spam after the fact. Even when I get hit with something not yet in the blacklist, it is very easy to remove it all.
Although I do require name/e-mail info. Do you think that’s too much?
I don’t need it to combat comment-spam yet – I don’t get much of that, but I like to be able to respond to the folks who post directly if need be….
By the way, saw your picture the other day, Dave. I blogged about it: Dave Slusher’s picture
kinrowan
i totally a gree an di also think there should be a way that we can get an email when the comment we posted is commented on once again so we can continue the conversation with out having to remember to go the the site every day to check
… it reminds me of Dave the programmer I knew back in the Ronler Acres days! -sln
You are absolutly right. Registration sux.
Bryan, the big problem with mailing the commentors is that when you do get comment spam, your box becomes a spam sender for everyone that has already commented. Having once got caught with an open proxy on an open box, I can tell you that having your box end up in blacklists and ORBS is highly unpleasant and should be avoided.