When I started Rat’s Reading, I was soon flooded by hundreds of spam comments. And no real comments. I was popular, w00t! Anyhow, to cut off the spam, I soon required that people who wanted to comment had to log in. Instant spam killer. And probably also comment killer too. I know one or two people who had to jump through some hoops to comment after forgetting passwords.
Since then, I’ve added a number of tools to the installation that make handling spam much easier. Comments are shut off 45 days after the last comment. 99% of the comment spam was coming on very old posts. Akismet came out. That handled a lot of spam too. Plus, it turned out that most of my comment spam was coming from one particular user agent (that’s tech-code for browser) that didn’t represent any real people. So I blocked it.
I was afraid that all these measures would still be insufficient were I to re-allow commenting without logging in and I would again be overwhelmed.
However, I quietly re-enabled account-less comments two weeks ago during the burst of Mankiw inspired interest. I had a huge increase in spam! That’s a little misleading though. I went from no spam whatsoever, to five or six a week, only one of which actually made it live. In other words, a quite manageable level.
So I pronounce the experiment a success and announce the official re-opening of account-less comments here at Rat’s Reading. If you’ve chosen not to comment because of the hassle, click through from your feed reader and comment away. No user name or password needed. The comments are also OpenID enabled as well.
