Change of comment policy

After a comment by Carrie on twitter and the resulting feedback I'm going to change the comment policy on the blog.

Word verification is now off. This is an attempt to improve the reader experience, because it seems captcha is annoying people a lot.

I have not turned moderation on. This is an experiment to see if I get hit with spam. If I do, moderation will have to go on because I really don't want the spam.

Please let me know what you think works best!

6 comments:

Matthew Delman said...

I think word verification is really only tremendously useful for places where there's a heckuva lot of traffic. Not that you don't get a whole monkey's butt of traffic, Gary, but there's places (i.e. Nathan Bransford's blog) that get reams more hits.

I mostly still have it on FtP because I'm too lazy to turn it off. I might get around to it soon though.

Cassandra said...

I agree with Matt. My first instinct is to say, turn that stuff on! But it makes sense to wait until the spammers start hitting you hard to turn it out. It gives your early adopters/fans a break. Hope things are going well!

Carrie Clevenger said...

Umm. I didn't start a fire. But truth, I've passed on leaving a comment simply because of the darned unreadable difficult CAPTCHAs.

Gary Corby said...

The major publishing blogs obviously receive vastly more hits than I ever will. I doubt that makes a difference to being spammed. There are bots which indiscriminately search for any targetable blog.

I retained the requirement to have an ID, so I'm hoping that will keep the bots away. It would be lovely if we didn't need any of this security at all.

The spammer & illegal file sharer problems are so severe I can imagine a day when everyone needs a verifiable ID for any net access.

Stephanie Thornton said...

It doesn't matter to me either way, Gary. You're stuck with me and my comments no matter what!

Bwahahahaha!

Gary Corby said...

And very happy I am to be stuck with you Stephanie and all my bloggy friends.

Without the internet, none of us would ever have met!