Leave Your Comments Open!

Naturally, many blog owners have some goals to pursuit. That's totally cool with me, as long as their goals don't enforce anything upon me. For example, I don't mind nicely integrated ads – I understand the desire of a blogger to earn some cash from his online creation, and I respect it. He (usually) doesn't beg me to click on a banner, and he doesn't hide any potentially useful content under the "click me" or "give me your email" page. I have a choice. I feel respected, because I can decide myself whether I want to click somewhere or not.

And when I see an interesting post and I have some useful information to add, I'm really pleased to see an indicator of open comments – like a number of comments left so far, etc. But when I click the link to leave a comment and see a message asking me to register, I immediately realize: the blogger asks for too much. He may get it from someone else, but not from me.You see, comments are adding value to his blog. By leaving comments, people share their opinion, ask questions and interact in all other possible ways.

Without comments, a blog looks strange. So, in effect, you're doing the owner of a blog a favor by leaving your comments. So he should be open and grateful to such favors.If, instead, the owner wants me to register – to pick a username and to provide one of my working emails, this immediately makes it obvious that the owner doesn't respect his visitors and commenters at all.

It is plain wrong to make people give you something personal (like an email) for a chance to do you a favor.If you have been this kind of blogger so far, change your tactics immediately cause you now understand why you are wrong! It's better to disable comments completely than leave them seemingly open but then ask for a registration.

This is another popular type of blogs and their owners. Many bloggers justify shutting their comments down by mentioning potential spam attacks and overwhelming efforts it's going to take to maintain clean comments and make sure no spam is allowed.

While this is a serious and quite real problem for many bloggers, there is a number of solutions available, and you don't have to be a rocket scientist to make them work:

Captchas

This is the most common way of protecting yourself from spam. Your blog automatically shows some image representing a textual information, and asks commenter for a confirmation of what is shown there.The logic behind this is that most spam is automatic. So if it's a spam bot, it will not likely "see" the textual information on the image, and won't be able to confirm it.

For human commenters, though, it's going to be quite easy to look at an image and type what they see in a separate field. Thus confirming the human nature of a comment and raising the possibility of a comment to be a real thing and a genuinely useful information.

Captchas usually show letters in different colours and shapes, so it's fairly hard to automate the recognition of letters on such images. For people it's still quite easy to do this, so captchas are very common and effective.

Spam word filters

Looking at spam comments left on your blog, you can probably see the nature of most of them and spot words which contradict the topic of your blog so much that it would be safe to make an association: if a comment contains some specific word, it's likely to be a spam and should not be shown on your pages.

Many blog engines support such filters and allow you to greatly reduce the number of spam post which get through.

Automatic spam filters

One word: Akismet. Speaking of spam protection, this is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Akismet is a centralized spam filter, and online engine which allows you to use its vast knowledge base to effectively filter out spam comments.

You use it by installing a plugin for your blog engine and entering an Akismet API key (get one free at WordPress.com after you sign up for an account there), and it automatically and – very important! – discreetly analyzes all the comments left on your blog, and marks spam ones for your later review. Whenever you log into your administration panel next time, you can see right away how many possible spam posts have been filtered out since your last session.

I like Akismet a lot, I use it for all my blogs and I enjoy lots of spam filtered out daily on an automatic basis – I hardly do anything about this spam. I log in, glance throgh all the spam, and click the "Delete all" button. That's it! Incredibly useful.

That being said, your mileage may vary ;) I hear, some people don't like Akismet at all. Oh well, I'm sure they have some alternatives then ;)