One of my pet peeves with blogs is when they require you to login to comment. Why should I have to login? What do I get out of it?

Some blogs do have a lot of visitors and use logins to control un-wanted comments. In this case, I can see logging-in as a way to control quality. However most blogs don’t get thousands of visitors an hour and have no need to require a login.

Lets not get this confused with spam. If you are getting lots of spam, get a spam plugin.

Even worse are those blogs that say ‘You must be logged in to comment’ but you can’t login because you haven’t registered and you can’t register because they never activated that feature on the blog. Then they wonder why they never get comments on their blog.

In my opinion, blog comments should be open to everyone and registration should not be required. If you do need to register, then the user should get additional value out of doing so.

What do you think?

Categories: BloggerDesign, Commentary, Usability

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007