Had a couple of run-ins with blogs requiring registration to leave comments. Sites have every right to do this and may well have good reasons (for example, their content might attract a lot of trolls / spammers) but in most cases it’s counter productive. You’re saying “we welcome your contribution but first please fill out this form”. Since most comments, like conversations in general, are off the cuff and immediate this requires the writer to spend more time applying than they would spend writing.
I’d advocate new blogs open up comments as wide as possible and apply restrictions as they become necessary. As a new site you need all the help you can get in building an audience. Think about a new shop opening on the high street. Firstly they’ll have their doors wide open )not just unlocked – wide open) so absolutely anyone can walk in. Then they’ll have a member of staff whose job it is to greet customers and help them find what they need – this is the equivalent of you asking for comments and joining in the discussion. And then, finally, they actually have what you need or offer to order it for you – the listening part.
Now, once the shop is established with a reliable customer base they can afford to change their strategy. Maybe they move the popular stuff to the back of the store so people have to walk past other products to get to it and increase opportunistic sales (this is why the milk is at the back of the supermarket). Maybe they move the greeter onto the tills to speed up sales. Maybe they de-emphaise their loss-leading special orders service and push the high-margin best sellers.
The point is they’re only able to do this once enough customers think it’s worth their while to shop there. If you want to force people to register to comment in order to build up a database of users to exploit you’re going to have to make it worth their while. The Guardian can do this because they’re the Guardian. Are you? Probably not.
The same, by the way, goes for CAPTCHAs – the fuzzy word-recognition thing implemented to prevent spam programs. It also prevents people with every so slightly fuzzy eyesight or the mildest of dyslexia (I have great trouble with these) let alone those with serious impairment. Spam-filtering software for blogs is fairly advanced now, especially on Wordpress, so you don’t really need to worry about it when you start out. It’s only when you hit higher Google rankings that you come on the spammers radar. For the first few months you’ll be fine.
Same applies to trolls. Unless you are blogging about contentious subjects or are bringing antagonism in from offline you’re unlikely to have to moderate comments to begin with, at least not across the whole site. The odd post of two might need attention but most of them aren’t going to be that active.
So open it all up. Welcome everyone. Greet them and talk with them and make them happy. Build a large pool of readers who actively want to contribute something. Then decide with them how you’re going to manage the conversation. But that’s another subject alltogether.
