QotD: Comments
Posted March 21st, 2004 @ 09:39pm by Erik J. Barzeski
Question: What are your thoughts on comment registration, TypeKey, etc.?
My Answer: I am not sure. The more I read about MT 3.0, the more I wish to get away from MovableType. It has almost no improvements, and where is this "Pro" version they said would be released last summer? Rebuilds are still necessary, and so on. Will I force people to register to leave comments? I don't think I like relying on another server when people are going to comment on my blog. If the authentication server is down, can I even comment on my own blog? No. And that's just silly.
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Posted 21 Mar 2004 at 10:00pm #
it is a good idea, you know who is leaving what, and people can make names for themselves. It would be great for you to be able to allow both on your blog, if you please, just as long as the non-registered do not conflict with the registered.
Posted 21 Mar 2004 at 10:19pm #
I like it & I'm looking forward to anything that would get rid of comment spam. Right now spam outnumbers legitimate comments by at least 3:1.
Posted 21 Mar 2004 at 10:22pm #
Comment Registration for upcoming MT 3.0
Here is my 5 cents opinion refering to nslog.com on the issue of new comment registration (typekey) feature for the MT 3.0. No doubt with centralized registration for commenting on blogs will help reduce comment spam but I suppose I...
Posted 21 Mar 2004 at 11:21pm #
I am against registering. It's really just a pain in the ass. It's one more account and password I have to keep track of.
Spamming won't be stopped with registration; spammers will just create throwaway accounts. Spam can be dealt with in other ways such as filters and real-time blacklists.
Posted 22 Mar 2004 at 2:30am #
To me (who runs blacklist and only gets a few spams a week (though no one ever comments on my blog, so they might be 50/50 :)) I'm against comment registration for myself. It lowers the barrier to entry and there are a few blogs I read that I'd love to comment on, but don't (accordian guy IIRC uses a reg system) simply because I'm lazy. Seems everything out there these days needs to take my email address, send me a code and all that crap and I really want to have some part of my online experience that doesn't require me to remember my password or register, or have to have my browser and mail open at the same time. Just sit down, type, and be heard.
Posted 22 Mar 2004 at 2:53am #
Maybe this is stupid of me to tell anyone, but I've come up with a simple solution for the multiple sign-ons/passwords problem. I just use the same name and a series of four passwords on everything. That way, no matter where I am, I just insert the same password. Not good for security, but as long as you use different passwords for different levels of security, you're fine. I don't really care if somebody breaks into my "hotornot.com" account, so why should I care if they have that password?
Posted 22 Mar 2004 at 8:28am #
Since I installed the MT-Blacklist plugin, I don't really have that much of a problem with spammers anymore. I'm looking forward to MT 3.0, although I don't know what's new in it.
Comment registration, however, is probably not something I'm going to use. But you never know, the people at SixApart are, in my opinion, very talented an has very good ideas, it wouldn't surprise me if they came up with a very nice solution.
Posted 22 Mar 2004 at 9:35am #
Personally I'd probably like it. I comment on more than a few MT/TypePad Blogs, always with the same name/info. Why should I have to fill out the comment form for each and every one?
I do see a problem with there being a single point of contact when it comes to comment systems though. As much as I like MT, I'm not sure I'd trust them to host an identification service.
So as a user, I'd like it. As a blogger I'm not so sure.
Posted 22 Mar 2004 at 4:46pm #
First of all, this will be optional, so if you don't want to use it on your blog, then don't. (Even if it's not officially optional, MT is written in Perl and if SixApart is dumb enough not to make it optional, there will be patches up within minutes of MT3's release.. but I don't think they're that dumb.)
Second, I think it will be very useful for those of us who comment on lots of MT-powered blogs.
Third, I trust SixApart. They've always seemed quite reasonable. Of course, when they grow to be a big company I'll probably have to reassess them to see if they continue to deserve my trust, but right now it's just five or six people, and the ones in charge have proven themselves to be very cool.
Fourth, I trust their server to stay up more than mine does. 🙂 Of course, that may change once there are ten thousand blogs out there hammering it with authentication requests.. I wonder how they're going to pay for it, anyway.
I'm looking forward to MT3 for other reasons (it's rumored to allow for plugins to customize the blog editing forms. I'd like to use MT as a CMS for some stuff at work, and it would be nice to be able to customize the editing system on a per-blog basis so I don't have to train everyone here to do things exactly the right way..)
Posted 25 Mar 2004 at 6:56pm #
I try to not have an opinion about things I have no real knowledge about, such as the future.
Posted 10 May 2004 at 3:33pm #
I've been testing MT3 since the second alpha, and I can testify that TypeKey is not that onerous. Not only is the implementation of TypeKey totally optional, but the option to use the service can also be left up to your visitors. You can see an example of how this works on my latest entry.
I'm currently using MT3 beta 3 full-time and I like what they've done with the platform. The one thing I wish they'd fix is rebuild times. In fact, the biggest pain in the ass about TypeKey is that it adds a bunch of conditional logic to your individual entry templates, increasing the time it takes to rebuild after new entries and comments. [*sigh*] No progress without pain, I suppose.
Posted 16 Sep 2004 at 10:43pm #
if my typekey identity would stick (cookies are fine with me) for any given blog, from the same IP, then i'd be all for it. it frustrates me to have to click "sign in" every time i want to post a comment.
it'll stick within the same browser window session i think, but no longer. (i might be mistaken, but that's what i have observed without any testing.)