Thursday, November 11, 2010

Some changes to my blog

I have decided to make some improvements to the comment system used by this blog. The previous commenting restrictions were put in place after a spate of automated comments aimed at "link spamming". Now that Blogger (Google) have put in place a comment spam filter I have been able to free things up slightly whilst not having to change to an external comment service (and lose all the existing comments).

Here are a summary of the changes:
  • You no longer need a Google account to leave a comment, but there is a message encouraging you to leave a name/URL so people can tell your comments from other people's. Sadly there is no way to force this in the blogger comments system currently.
  • I have removed moderation. All new comments will be instantly posted to the blog.
  • I have removed the captcha barrier for posting comments (but may reintroduce it if spam becomes a problem).
  • I have modified the "x comments" link that appears on each post so it encourages people to leave a comment.

Lets see how it goes. My guess is that I will need to re-enable captcha at some point, but Blogger's anti spam system may be good enough to not require that.