Registering for comments – tell us what you think

Comment moderation is one of the hardest, sometimes the hardest, part of blogging for The F-Word. In order to reduce some of the energy involved, we want to introduce commenter registration.

This means that you would need to register (for free of course) using a valid email address in order to post a comment, as is the practice across most/many blogs. It would still be possible to post anonymously (for example, if you have a personal experience you want to share) but this will involve going the extra step of setting up a new account.

Under this system, commenters who have built up a reputation with the bloggers collective of responsible commenting within our comment policy could be able to post ‘live’, however the majority of comments would still be moderated before publication. We would obviously still unpublish comments which break our policy. (We’ll make it clear how this will work in practice if we decide to go ahead.)

Many of the benefits are ‘backend’, and would greatly ease up the energy we need to devote to comment moderation. But the blog will benefit as well, because us bloggers will hopefully be able to direct more of that energy to writing posts, commissioning guest posts and improving the site.

This is the time to tell us what you think about the idea and practice of commenter registration – this will guide whether or not we adopt this system, and how exactly we operate it.

  • How do you feel about comment registration?
  • Would you like the option to become a commenter able to post ‘live’ comments?
  • If we introduce such a system, should we have the option to log in using Twitter, Facebook, UniqueID, etc?