If you’re trying to set up a comment system for your web site, there are a few tips I want to share with you:
- At first, moderate everything. The spam bots will find you faster than the real users will, and despite genuine advances in anti-spam technology, some spam will slip through. Once you get a decent number of readers who comment on your post, disable comment moderation.
- Let people provide their web site address. Not only does this motivate people with blogs to comment on a high-traffic web site (because it brings them traffic), but this makes your web site a good place for other readers to find interesting links.
- If you ask people for their e-mail address, do not spam them—a thank you e-mail is usually fine, but unexpected mail from a web site breeds anger and hatred.
- Never ask for e-mail validation before you let people post comments. 99% will give up, and by the time the validation e-mail arrives in their inbox, 99% of those remaining will have lost their interest in writing a comment.
- If you don’t have too many comments, respond to as many as you can. What you need is a conversation and a feeling of mutual respect and empathy, otherwise, people won’t come back. If they provide a blog link, go read that blog and comment there as well.
- Don’t use captcha validation. If you do, make sure people only have to enter it once (as opposed to once every time they write a new comment).
Any tips you wish to share? Please tell me about them in the (snicker) comments below.
Hi. I'm Victor Nicollet,
The only feature I’d add to this list is an email subscription option. It makes it easier to have a conversation (rather than just one-off comments) if commenters are notified when someone replies to them. Obviously this needs to be an option that the user can decide though, so as not to violate your anti-spam rule.
Side note: I recently built my own commenting system and I think I may have found a decent way to block spammy comments without having to moderate or use a captcha. The comment form is submitted via AJAX and the button to submit it is just an image (not a form element), so it would be difficult for a spam program to figure out how to submit the form. I know it doesn’t guarantee no spam, but so far it’s been doing a good job.
This method means that people who don’t have javascript enabled can’t comment, but that’s already true for any blog that uses Disqus or IntenseDebate, so I think that’s an acceptable compromise. What do you think?
@Tyler King: I swear I’ll get the email subscription option soon!
As for Javascript-based comments, people without Javascript are a small minority, and most of them know that this will prevent them from doing many things online. I’m curious about what the Javascript support is among people who are socially active online.