19 April 2008

Comments and Comment Settings

I wasn't organized enough to participate in Robin's most excellent carnival on blog reader appreciation, but it's never too late to tell people you appreciate their presence and their words. So thank you, readers. I love my readers and commenters (and those of you who read and every now and again delurk). When I check my site meter, I'm even grateful for people I can see are reading and not commenting. You don't mind when I post less often, or more often, and you read through my various blogging moods: more academic for a while, more adoption for a while, more meme-y for a while. Thank you for reading. I read and write much of most days at work, but I enjoy having this space to write in a different voice, about different topics, with people who follow my random strands of consciousness over time.

With all that appreciation in mind, let me ask a question about comment setting on blogger. Aetako notes in the comments on punctuation that my comment settings are changed to prevent anonymous comments: I recently changed the comment settings from "anyone can comment" to "registered users--includes OpenID." I made that change because for the past 20 posts or so, every post I make generates four anonymous Chinese spam comments (at least, I assume it's spam b/c I can't read Chinese!). I got tired of deleting it. Although, come to think of it, the last post generated Chinese spam from a registered-with-blogger user with the userid "you," and I had to delete that, too. I don't know why my little blog attracts these 4-spam Chinese spambots, and I don't know why it bugs me that someone wants to attach spam to some older posts. So maybe I should just go back to letting anyone comment.

Anyone have strong feelings about this? I don't want to discourage people who want to comment here!

10 comments:

Inside the Philosophy Factory said...

Often I don't comment because the version of my reader on my home computer is screwy about comment windows...

My own blog is set not to allow anonymous comments, but that is because debaters can be real jerks if they can do so without attribution...

Setting up a gogle account isn't all that difficult, so if the person really wants to comment, they can do so. If it prevents spam, keep it the way it is.

Bardiac said...

Thanks for the thanks :) You write a really good blog, so thanks for writing.

I agree with the Philosophy Factory. It's just not that hard to sign up and if you're getting spam problems, that's better than having to delete them or us having them sitting there being irritating.

Magpie said...

I've gotten that spam (I think it's Japanese) too - whether I have the word verification thing on or off. And, yes, it comes in waves of three or four. Weird.

Tom Bozzo said...

I ended up turning on the comment moderation feature to deal with similar problems. (I'd also turned off comments to some specific older posts which were spam magnets.) This was mainly for my own convenience, since I can turf an inappropriate comment with fewer clicks that way.

Arwen said...

Well, I'm a regular commenter. Who was OWL in the last test?
You might know me also as the temporary steward of EB Jones.

The only reason I'm not being more explicit is because my blogger name is my more anonymous and genderless name (primarily for use in places technical and economic), and for reasons of creepy internet stalkerism, I don't always want people to be able to follow me home.

However, I should and probably will sign up to a second blogger account with my real name. So don't worry about it. ((Or, you can get used to me as the race and gender ambiguous AeTakeo!))

Arwen said...

Changing display names is also possible.

Arwen said...

*g*

Scrivener said...

I don't have strong feelings about it at all, but I have never been able to get the OpenID to work. I have tried signing in to it so that my comments direct people to my functioning WordPress blog, rather than to a dead-end Blogger profile page, but I absolutely cannot sign in to it. When I try, it tells me I'm not logged into Wordpress & sends me to dashboard there, where I am logged in and it tells me to click on another link to sign in to OpenID, which sends me back to the signin page, which sends me back to the dashboard, which sends me back to the sign in page. I've left requests for help on the Blogger help page & no one has ever responded.

Jody said...

I don't have any strong opinion about comment moderation/requirements one way or another, but then again, I have both blogger and Google user names (well, they're merged now, but you hopefully get my point) so I'm maybe not the best qualified person to decide.

Liz Miller said...

I had mine set to no anonymous commenters, then kept getting comments from that "you" person anyway, so turned it back off so that a few folks I know who are being stalked can still comment.