Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
Anonymous cowards to be ignored
I consider comments to be an essential part of the whole blogging experience. Especially when writing less than neutral posts (which I love to do, for various reasons), it is important to get that direct feedback from comments. I want to get to the point where the blog post is perhaps only two-third of the total value, with the remaining third coming from the emerging discussions in the comment section.
But I didn’t like the default settings of Posterous. Every comment needs to be moderated. It effectively kills any discussion attempt. And whenever I moderate (well, is my accept-everything policy so far even moderating?), I feel the strange urge to reply to the comments. Which means I was responsible for half of the comments in my last blog post. I always disliked that when I saw it on other blogs, but now I know why it happens.
So better to just let everything show up instantly, and reserve the right to delete comments (which I think I never did, but that’s of course the blessing of usually only getting very few, or zero, comments).
Not quite. Because I have to think about anonymous posters, too. I feel that keeping the entry barrier for comments as low as possible is a good thing. Captchas are already annoying enough, but I’d be insane to disable them. So allowing anonymous comments is good, right? I no longer know!
After talking to my brother, he said that he would never again allow anonymous comments on his blog, even if he fixed commenting there. So I looked around the web a bit, and searched for anonymous posts on blogs. Instead of contributing to the discussion, they seemingly only add noise and/or are used to insult the blogger. Seems my brother was right about it, once more. But if nothing useful comes out of anonymous comments (unless you consider insults to be valuable feedback), then why have them?
That is why for this blog, I will handle comments without moderation, but delete if absolutely needed. Commenters will have to be logged in with one of the services that have been integrated with the Posterous comment system. Twitter login for example works. I just hope that Posterous stays up for while after the take-over by Twitter, to make all the time I invested in setting up this blogging space worth-while ;–)
