Comment forms on content pages – do you allow non-member comments on your site?

[shoebob]

Hi there,

I’m coordinating the development of a website and we’re trying to increase user engagement. We are considering adjusting our pages to allow users to add comments without having to be a member (similar to what appears to be functioning on this site).

Just wondering, how do you (the public and CSS-TRICKS) moderate the comments? Do they go into a queue to be approved? If so, how often is the queue checked? Do you run a captcha on the comment form?

Thanks in advance for any feedback/advice offered,
shoebob.

[Paulie_D]

As far as I know CSS-Tricks requires a user of sign-up to comment in these here forums.

This is a simple procedure. There is CAPTCHA on sign-up and there may be email verification but once signed up commenting is open and not subject to approval.

Comments (from signed up users) do not require approval which means that us Mods have to be on our toes as far as Spam goes, although Chris may have some back-end system in place to weed out most of it…I don’t know.

There is a ‘Flag’ option at the top of each post if other users wish to highlight a particular post for attention but that’s only viewable by the Admin (again AFAIK) and not the Moderators.

In general, I don’t think that open commenting by non-members is a good idea. If you aren’t logging some information how can you weed our or block unwanted troublemakers…of which, there are, unfortunately, a few.

Equally, if someone isn’t willing to give you, at least, an email address, how seriously can you take their ‘engagement’?

[CrocoDillon]

Commenting on CSS Tricks blog part doesn’t require signup afaik, right?

Instead of captcha you can try a honeypot, only recently learned about them so can’t give you implementation details. But I think it’s something like a hidden input field you give a reasonable name, bots fill the input field but humans don’t because they can’t even see them. On the backend you can then discard all submissions where the honeypot input has a value.

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