If you came here as a result of a comment I made on your blog, thanks! You might want to consider changing your comment policy to allow people with their own domains to make comments on your site.

Restricting comments to only those people with a wordpress.com or Blogger site login (or, worse yet, expecting folks to register at your own site before they can comment) is a guaranteed way to keep the number of comments on your site way down in the single digits. If that’s what you want, cool.

However, if you want your site to be an active, vibrant community where people visit, comment and genuinely feel welcome, consider opening it up a touch – a simple Name and URL field isn’t too much to ask for.

I understand you’re concerned about spam. Yes, it’s evil and all spammers deserve to rot in Hell. Trust me, I know.

I use WordPress on my own domain and the excellent Akismet plugin. That’s dealt with over 100,000 comment spams over the past two years without fault or complaint. It’s low maintenance, I’ve seen next to zero false positives and those few (<20 in all that time) spams which have manages to sneak through I’ve caught manually because I have WordPress set to always moderate the first comment of any new visitor.

If your blogging platform doesn’t let you allow let real people in, and keep spammers out, maybe it’s time to change it to one that does.

Think about it.

Thank you.