Do you comment on your favorite blog posts? Do you need to register? I work for Brodeur as a developer/designer building many of our clients’ blogs. I am constantly plagued by the decision of whether to leave comments open and unregistered or to require a simple login to avoid spam.

 

As a user, I would obviously rather not sign up and would contribute more on a topic where I didn’t have to register first.

 

As a developer, and a person who hates spammers, I would prefer to require a simple login while making spamming punishable by death (ok life in jail).

 

The real question is – What works best for attaining contribution from your audience. Are you as a user, unlikely to comment on blogs that require registration?

 

Something to think about – Techcrunch recently removed the login process as requirement for their users and now gets 10,000 spam comments a day.

 

As part of our “open” theme here at Brodeur, and the fact that our readers (that’s you) are not participating in the conversation as much as we had anticipated, open comments will be coming soon to the Brodeur blog. 

 

Let us know what you think.

 

Many thanks to Steve Hodgdon (CHECKMATE – the beaupre blog) for pushing me in the right direction!