Blog building blocks: comments (or no comments?)

By Filip Salo; published on October 15, 2006.

Well, it had to be done, so that's what I'm doing. I'm building a new blog system.

It'll be a Django app, and boy, it will be fine. I'm talking deeelicious. I am not, however, talking del.icio.us, because that's the topic of a future post.

Håkan Kjellerstrand just had enough of comment spammers and is disabling all comments (Swedish) on his blog for now. It seems to be a bit of a trend, and that makes me weary of adding comments to what I'm building without thinking it through very carefully first.

I can't say I've really even decided on having comments to begin with, which means it'll definitely not make it in in the first few iterations. But I'm leaning towards doing it, if I can only find a reasonably spam-proof solution that's still easy on benign humans who want to engage in civil on-topic conversation.

(Of course, there is a place for yapping about penile enlargement and suspiciously cheap software, too. But this is not it.)

I'll be looking into it over the next week or so, but I'd love to hear from real people doing real stuff - what's working for you and what's not? Captchas? Manual moderation (not doing that). Requiring user to register first? Email confirmations? Akismet? Poo-flinging monkeys at the front desk?

Really, _any__ solution involving monkeys will be given special consideration.

Say a few words at filip.salomonsson@gmail.com. (Yeah, I'm stepping down from the "obscure your email address from spambots" train. It's mostly a matter of principle.)