I think what I’ll probably do is just take out the email address field in my comments, and the ”why did I put that in there in the first place” email link in the entry byline, link to a hardened contact form, and trust that anyone who comments and wants email contact will leave a link to a page that links to their contact form.
]]>I like it because it seems to give me a slightly added layer of protection in that people seem less likely to leave spam or trolling comments when asked to give an address. I just make sure I’ll never publish it.
]]>In any case, I can’t agree about requiring an email address to post: in my experience, if you do (or even if you don’t but people don’t bother to look), you just get a ton of comments from people who apparently work for the B Company, since they get their mail at b.com. That has its amusing effects, like the way that (last time I checked) using a at b dot com in any Radiocomments form attaches your name to every comment Mark Pilgrim has ever left on anyone’s Radio weblog, and I think it’s great that you can hardly get a workable email address to ”register” at the New York Times by just pounding on the keyboard, since Mr. alskaweoiupwieqth from apwoeituqpwoirt dot com has usually already signed up, but in practical terms, unless you require a confirmation click on a URL sent to an address, requiring one just requires a fake, and once people are faking you end up looking at the real ones with a jaundiced eye (I failed to reply to someone once, because I assumed that the @hell.com address was a joke, not a real address).
If it works for you, great, but not requiring one has worked so well for me that I think just ripping the field out of the form will work even better.
]]>Now its got that form you wanted as well as the xmlrpc interface. See http://www.openweblog.info/ for more info.
]]>Phil Ringnalda writes about Dave upgrading the weblogs.com machine and finding someone crawling it. I’m trying really hard not to…
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