May Need to Enable Registrations for Comments

Since I started my site about two years ago I have managed to avoid having to turn on registrations. Enabling registrations would mean that anyone wishing to comment would need to ‘register’ before they could post a comment.

However over the last couple of months the amount of SPAM comments being posted have started to increase. I don’t know why really because it is not as though I get much traffic to my site and usually the SPAMmers are trying to sell something, or get people to go to a site where they are selling something. Hence they usually SPAM popular sites; certainly not waste-land sites that don’t get more than about 60 to 70 uniques per day.

At this stage I am going into the site about twice a day to check for and clean out SPAM comments. The two main SPAMmers that I keep getting are selling sporting goods and equipment, or watches.

I don’t want to enable registrations because doing this tends to put people off from commenting. People generally don’t want to provide a valid e-mail and decode some cryptic text before they can put in comments. Also I have enough trouble getting people to comment as it is. I have not gone through and checked but if I am averaging one comment per ten postings I would be surprised.

I am hoping the SPAMmers will move on and leave my site alone but the bottom line is that if they don’t I will have to enable registrations. Obviously I will let you know if and when this happens.