Housekeeping item: no more anonymous comments

One of my least favorite things to do here is close things down and make it hard­er for vis­i­tors to my site to inter­act with me, the site, and the oth­er users. Cre­at­ing an account on a web­site can be more time-con­sum­ing than is worth just to make an off­hand remark. I want to see those off­hand remarks.

How­ev­er, spam attacks have increased to such a lev­el that it has become impos­si­ble to mod­er­ate the com­ments. Recent­ly web­site attacks of all sorts have increased tremen­dous­ly; the vol­ume of com­ment spam attempts has gone from around a hun­dred per day this time last year to over eight thou­sand per day. Even with fan­tas­tic spam pro­tec­tion tools (Incap­su­la helps keep spam­bots away from the site to begin with, and Mol­lom and Stop Forum Spam have been big helps in deal­ing with the attack­ers that make it to the com­ment forms) the vol­ume of attacks and the increas­ing sophis­ti­ca­tion of these attacks has become overwhelming.

There is only one of me, and being the geeky web­site devel­op­er sort of blog­ger that I am, I already spend way too much time mak­ing the site run and updat­ing the soft­ware, and far too lit­tle time actu­al­ly writ­ing. This morn­ing I delet­ed a cou­ple hun­dred posts from the com­ment mod­er­a­tion queue. That’s time that I could have spent on things I’d rather do¹It’s a very long list. and the pos­si­bil­i­ty that I’d acci­den­tal­ly miss a gen­uine com­ment in all that spam is quite dis­cour­ag­ing as well.

So anony­mous com­ments are going the way of the pas­sen­ger pigeon.² Dinosaurs were made extinct by a plan­e­tary acci­dent. Dodos’ extinc­tion was caused by humans by a com­bi­na­tion of means, both acci­den­tal and delib­er­ate. Pas­sen­ger pigeons were hunt­ed until there weren’t any more. Sites allow­ing anony­mous com­ments have like­wise been hunt­ed until they were all gone. In their place alter­nate means of authen­ti­ca­tion have been added to the login page. OpenID logins have been enabled for some time, and to that Face­book login and Twit­ter login have been added. Still under con­sid­er­a­tion are Google logins and com­ment providers like Disqus.

I hope that this actu­al­ly makes it more con­ve­nient for most peo­ple to go ahead and leave com­ments. To any­one this incon­ve­niences, I apologize.

• 1
  It’s a very long list.
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  Dinosaurs were made extinct by a plan­e­tary acci­dent. Dodos’ extinc­tion was caused by humans by a com­bi­na­tion of means, both acci­den­tal and delib­er­ate. Pas­sen­ger pigeons were hunt­ed until there weren’t any more. Sites allow­ing anony­mous com­ments have like­wise been hunt­ed until they were all gone.