Comments, Disqus, and Changes

Before I launch off on a tiny rant, let me just say up front that I love Disqus. I especially love being able to reply to comments (or handle sp*m) from my BlackBerry. It makes it simple to be mobile and not worry about the blog.

On the other side, the sp*mmers must be having a bad year too, because they’re getting more and more desperate with their nonsense comments, especially on old posts. Even with the Disqus tools, they’re sneaking through and leaving droppings for me to clean up for them.

My options are to either close comments on old posts or to close the option to allow comments by anonymous and unregistered users.

The thing is, people do comment on some of the older posts, and the comments are usually around the Automotive Advisers mailings or Firstline posts. They’re good to have, because they keep any reader current on the new ways these scammers are helping themselves to our bank accounts.

That leaves me with requiring Disqus registration or Friendfeed membership, and that’s what I’m opting for. I’ve integrated Friendfeed with the comments, so if you’re a Friendfeed user, you can comment via Friendfeed and your comments will appear on the post.

Otherwise, register with Disqus. It’s fast, free and really not invasive at all. Register once, and then you can comment away here as you please.

Time and attention are in short supply for all of us…I’d rather pay attention to those of you who take the time to come, read and post real comments than have to slog through a bunch of nonsense to get to the ones that are from real people.

As an added bonus, if you want to actually take the time to do a video comment, you can leave that here now too. I’ve also made the same changes to the political blog commenting, since I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before that one is discovered, too.

Tagged as: Blogging, comments, Community, Disqus, spam, Wordpress