Are You Driving Blog Commenters Away?

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For bloggers everywhere comment spam is an ongoing problem. As a result, most blogs have some sort of security mechanism to try to filter most of the robot comment spam and general rubbish.

But is your security set up in a way that actually discourages genuine commenters?

Fortunately for bloggers using the Wordpress system, the Akismet security application that it comes with filters out the vast majority of comment spam (at least it does for me) without it clogging up my system.

But for a number of other blogging platforms the only control mechanism available seems to be those annoying CAPTCHAS where you have to enter a string of meaningless letters into a box before you can submit your comment.

Some of them aren’t too bad as they use words with some distortion applied to them rather than random letters. At least then you can read the word and type it in rather than have to keep flicking your eyes back and forth to the random letter string. And some of those letter strings are sooo long.

I find Typepad to be probably the most annoying of these systems. Just when you think you’ve submitted your comment and you wait for the page to refresh, it bumps you to another page where you need to enter the CAPTCHA info. I get caught by this all the time as I flit from tab to tab, not realizing that I haven’t actually completed my comment submission.

The most recent trend in comment submission controls seems to be a little drop down box where you identify which blogging platform you use before you can leave a comment. This is similar to the Blogger requirement where you identify if you are a Blogger user or not.

As someone who publishes on my own server I often find this frustrating. And frequently I am prevented from leaving a comment because the blog owner has not set up their system to allow owner-bloggers like me to leave a comment.

Now I know that pretty much everyone who writes a blog is excited when they get comments and they would want to encourage them. So I’m assuming that these bloggers don’t realise they are actually slamming the door in the face of potential commenters.

This could be you, and you don’t even realise it.

So perhaps you should take a look at your own blog security setup.

Are you inadvertently discouraging commenters?

Remember there are more people out in the blogosphere who use blogging systems other than the one you use. Why not let them into your blogging world too?