House Rules for Blog Comments???

Today Simon talked about some of the tradeoffs of requiring authentication for comments VS allowing anonymous comments in ones blog. He goes with the latter, but with some house rules worth considering.
[Via WebMink (Click for Full Post)]

....I'm transparent with my identity here - readers can see my photo and read my bio if they choose - and I expect visitors posting comments to be equally transparent. If you mean it, say it and sign it, otherwise don't say anything at all. Consequently I'd like to make it clear that any and all comment postings are expected to have enough information in them to identify you reliably to me - a URL, a hint at an e-mail, a signature from a regular visitor, whatever works. Postings without this information will most likely be deleted. It's a house rule - not up for discussion. And let's not even begin to discuss astroturfing.

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 02, 2004
  Interesting... On one of my older personal blogs I decided it would be good for anyone to be able to post comments.
  
  It worked a treat, many blog readers, and many blog commenters. But then came the day the blogs' google rank raised significantly to be noticeable by spam bots.
  
  The next thing you know, yep, spam in the comments. I decided to turn on the function that the user had to at least enter in their name, email and website address (I hoped it would help drive away the spammers).
  
  It worked, annoyed some blog readers (hence less blog comments), but after a little while the spammers arrived armed with some "fake" URL's.
  
  User Authentication, I guess is a bit like forcing users to fill in all their details before being able to post a comment.
  
  It's good for various reasons, but you'll probably draw away many other readers. They may come once or twice, they may even add you to their RSS readers, but you won't be able to get any interaction with them.
  
  Some users will feel excluded because of the need to authenticate themselves through a signup process to your blog.
  
  Personally, I do like to leave my name and email (if there is an email field) and blog address. However, where my blog is currently hosted, there is no option to allow for anonymous type comments. It forces you to be a member of that particular service (thespoke.net) to be able to leave a comment. Many blog readers don't want to be forced to do that.
  
  Another blog community I used to post on allowed for bloggers to leave comments as anonymous (forced to leave Name/Email, and Website as optional) the anonymous option meant that the email would be only be accessible to the blog owner, and everyone else via a form interface. The other option was to be a member of that blog community through a signup process.
  
  The other convenient thing though was that you had the option to save a cookie which saved your Name/Email/Website if you visited again (which most blogging sites these days allow for). I think this option is very similar to my first experience I mentioned, the blog readers who are most determiend to post a comment will abide by the simple requirement of leaving their name and a way of contact if it meant their view could be shared with the blog author as well as other readers of the blog.
  
  Ok, perhaps this comment is overly long and could probably be best regarded as blog spam!
• Anonymous
  June 02, 2004
  Two days into blogging, I posted this:
  http://blogs.msdn.com/rick_schaut/archive/2004/02/10/71027.aspx
  I keep a link to it on my main page (in the news section).
  
• Anonymous
  June 03, 2004
  Will: Wow, that's a large comment. I think the openness was great at first, but I believe that blogging will soon be overrun with the volume and spamming that has embraced usenet. Its one reason I hear often for wishing web boards had acceptable performance. Becuase the conversations there can be of highger quality with the participants validated.
  
  Rick: That's an even more impressive set of house rules. Have you ever been flamed for removing comments? How many do you remove?
• Anonymous
  June 03, 2004
  Josh, blogging has been around for a long while, and I've been blogging on/off since late 2001. I honestly think that yes, the volume of bloggers will dramatically increase, (everyone wants to jump aboard a good thing these days, or rather follow the leader).
  
  I don't think that web boards will overtake blogging, because with a weblog it is much more personal, and you often find moderators on web boards don't take too kindly for off topic remarks in threads.
  
  True that the content maybe much higher quality, but do you really want to take away the personal side that is offered by a blog? I think even if web boards have markedly improved performance, there will still be blogs existing out there. There will still be blog readers, perhaps not directly accessing the blogs, but reading it via a news aggregator. Which I guess is quite the case now with many.
  
  I'm sure they'll sit nicely side by side, eventually. :)
  
  [Honestly, I don't even know how these comments end up being so long!]
• Anonymous
  June 03, 2004
  Josh: Surprisingly, I've had to spend very little time policing the comments. I've reposted some comments because someone was misrepresenting himself as a Microsoft employee, and have deleted a few items of comment spam. That's it. The person who was misrepresenting himself wasn't overly pleased, but that's the worst it's ever been.
  
• Anonymous
  June 04, 2004
  Rick: Thanks.
  William: I think you confused my comments about web boards. I was only comparing some users reasons for migrating from non-trustworthy USENET systems to more locked down web board communities. It had less to do with blogs really. I think, that ultimately for reputation to be properly leveraged on a community circle (like blogging) that there should be some more security around it.
• Anonymous
  July 20, 2004
  I have to look into something like that for my website.
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