Taking the Pulse on Anonymous Commenting
We’ve been getting more and more requests from readers to eliminate anonymous commenting. (The topic has also been on the front-burner because of a certain article this week.) There are clearly major flaws with a system that allows commenting without accountability, but doing away with it carries its own set of drawbacks in the form…
We’ve been getting more and more requests from readers to eliminate anonymous commenting. (The topic has also been on the front-burner because of a certain article this week.) There are clearly major flaws with a system that allows commenting without accountability, but doing away with it carries its own set of drawbacks in the form of diminished information flow, opinion and overall energy on the site. We’re curious to know how the community feels about the issue so please take a moment to fill out this survey and chime in below.
Thanks,
Mr. B
p.s. Just to clarify, just because you register, and comment under, a username, does not mean that your true identity is on display for the world to see. It means we can easily block a disruptive commenter, or contact him/her by email about bad behavior. It also means that other readers can begin to associate comments over time with a particular online identity, theoretically improving the ability to carry on discussions.
I think anonymous commenting should be eliminated. It takes less than 60 secs to register a username…
Please DON’T eliminate guest commenting. Isn’t there a way to fix the problem without eliminating anonymous comments?
“I miss the REAL The What. This poser What is lame.”
Nope nope! Brownstoner has lifted the block on my IP address and for that I will keep the profanity down. Now some times I may go off my meds but, if you keep cursing people WILL tune you out! Even for me it’s a bit too much. So people I’m not shiczoid or nothing, just chilling.
The What
Someday this war is gonna end….
anon posting actually gets more honest posts. Most are not intelligent, but they are not edited for an audience as much as logged in users are. It might be ugly and a waste of time at times, but it is much more real.
Without the participation of so many guests this particular host probably wouldn’t have had a party exciting enough to write an article about.
x
guest
The diff between guest and logged in is really not that great- it causes a few extra keystrokes. You can mitigate any trouble by asking the user to log in as part of of submitting comments- inline, on the same page. The separate log in screens are a bad way to go.
allowing a ‘flag this post’ feature like craigslist would help you and this site
threats by people who say they won’t comment if logged in shouldn’t be taken that seriously- others will still comment and read. Many will just switch to logging in- if you’re depending on spam comments and trolls for page hits, then that’s a different story, and a different problem
maybe you do some of these arlready but worth mentioning:
-impose a length limit on the comments
-check that your logins aren’t originating from different IP addresses, and log people out if they are
-recommendations or rankings of commenters that would encourage people to make useful comments, like wikipedia or linked in might promote better site activity.
-it’s your site- not really a democracy- so pulling comments, editing comments, blocking IDs, etc should be done at your discretion without fear. at the end of the day, you need to encourage readbility and usability- why are people loggin in? To read obscenity? Or to find useful info on brownstone brooklyn and house improvement? You decide- then make your site funciton the way you want. Right now, you seem to be benefitting just as much from the negative commenting (at least in the media)-
I agree with 11:00 – allow anonymous posting with a name – like the old days – addresses almost everyone’s concerns – except for the troll posting irrelevant stuff
and I also agree with 11:02 – I cant log in if I tried – it doesnt recongnize my registered name and if I try to re-register I never get (even in spam) the confirmatory email. – in sum – you registration system is seriously broken.
why 11:12?
Bxgrl beat me to most of what I was going to say (and who said more and better than I would have).
11:02, I agree with your observation, but what’s made me lose interest is the degeneration in the quality of the discussion on the boards.
My own belief is that if you require registration, the people who are serious about commenting will still comment (including, unfortunately, people who are serious about their malice), but it’ll be easier to weed out those miscreants. I also suspect that it’ll discourage those who’d otherwise carelessly lob in “my neighborhood is better than yours”-style comments.