Allowing Comments

The whole topic of blog comments is a rather complex one.  A blogger has many decisions to make regarding how comments will be treated on their blogs.  The first decision is to whether or not to allow comments followed by whether to restrict comments on certain posts on an individual basis.  Not allowing comments on an individual post basis may be desirable for controversial posts.  Blogger maked this easy by using three choices in the edit posts/post options setting.  So if you normally allow comments it is possible to toggle comments off for that post only.

I was recently reading in the forums that some readers are not leaving comments because they don't want to jump through hoops to leave comments.  Some really don't like the way Blogger is set up for comments but is really is rather straight forward.  The settings/comments allows toggling one of four options as to who may comment.  I prefer the anyone setting which allows anyone in the next two groups as well as those wanting to use name/url then use comment moderation to prevent comment spam.

• Anyone - includes Anonymous Users
• Registered Users - includes OpenID
• Users with Google Accounts
• Only members of this blog

The problem arises when some using Blogger set to allow only those readers using OpenID or users with Google Accounts.  Forcing a reader to sign-in using a third party is a hoop many readers don't want to do.  This brings in the problem of other blogs that now want you to sign-in with your Facebook or Twitter sign-in information.  Apparently one of the most disliked third party sign-in system is with Disqus.  I personally will not use third party sign-in to comment on any blog.

The final issue that comes up with respect to comments is making the reader fill in a capitcha (word verification).  Initially this feature was introduced to help curb comment spam.  This is a way to ensure those leaving comments are humans and not bots.  The main problem is the vast majority of readers don't like using capitcha.  If you have comments set to moderation, unless comment spam is a huge problem as in multiple daily posts via bots then there really is no need to use capitcha.

Garden Gnome