Real Kato Blog: Blog Note: Anonymous Commenting

I've recently made some changes to discourage anonymous commenting.

I don't like anonymous comments. I mean, I've been known to make them myself, in public Internet forums. But my little blog here is not really a public forum. As much as I like getting lots of readers here, including strangers, I still want this to blog to have a friendly community feel. So I don't want people to hide behind anonymous comments. If you're commenting here, you should be inviting discussion and feedback, and you should do it without shame. I'm making a particular effort to be open about my own life, so the least you could do is give me your name.

So I've changed the commenting system to require a name and e-mail address. There's nothing preventing you from putting in something fake: I'm not going to be a nazi about it. And even if you put your real e-mail address here, Haloscan's encoding system should hopefully prevent you from getting spam. I just want to for you to have some kind of identity... and it would be nice to be able to get in touch with you, in case I want to SHOWER YOU WITH CASH. In case you don't know me, that's something I've been known to do for people from time to time, especially if they also include the URLs of their own blogs. I'm just sayin'.

I almost wrote "SHOWER WITH YOU FOR CASH". Darn martinis.

Jen wrote: "I can understand why you want someone to put in a name, though really that is meaningless because they could put in anything they wanted, but why are you requiring email address, too?"

My reply was: "Because, it's just one extra bit of unique identification that someone would have to come up with, even if it's fake. I'm just trying to discourage the casual trolls, that's all."

So, that's the deal with the commenting changes. Hope it's not too onerous for you.

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