How To Lose Me As A Blog Reader
July 15th, 2007 by Cristina Favreau
While running down my Google Alerts today, I noticed someone quoted me on their blog with a link back here. The appreciative entrepreneur that I am, I wanted to thank her for the reference and link, by posting a comment on her blog. Imagine my disappointment when I got to the “post a comment” section and found this message:
Comments are moderated, and will not appear on this weblog until the author has approved them.
This weblog only allows comments from registered users. To comment, please Sign In.
AAARRRGGGHHH!!!
I can’t help but think that people who don’t allow comments on their blogs are conceited. They seem to be screaming “What’s written here is the only thing that matters. I’m cramming in as many keywords as possible to boost my Google ranking. I don’t really care what you think.”
I also know there are many of you who are sending this message out unintentionally.
A few months ago, the same thing happened when I found Stephanie Chandler’s blog. I immediately resonated with her and loved her entertaining, witty, no-nonsense style — I, at once, added her to my list of favorite marketing blogs.
One post in particular inspired me, and I wanted to let her know by posting a comment. When I clicked the No Comments link (I’m thinking: “Yay! I get to be the first to comment!“) I got the same kind of message as above, saying I need to be signed in to post a comment.
“Weird,” I thought. “She says right here ‘Please feel free to post a comment or send me a message and let me know your thoughts!‘ I don’t want to register yet another account… I just want to leave a stinkin’ comment! What is this, grade school? I don’t have time for this nonsense.”
Needless to say, I was pretty upset about the whole situation. Sitting alone in my office, I grumbled words like “unprofessional,” “inconsiderate” and “how dare she?” Wasting no time, I deleted her from my favorites just as quickly as it had been added, then I closed her blog from my browser, never to be graced by my presence again.
Call me capricious… Call me a diva… Call me what you will (I blame it on raging pregnancy hormones at the time!), but I see this WAY too often.
What are you bloggers thinking? Do you really expect us to sign up for an account we may only use once? Come on! Get with the program.
I GET that blog spam is a problem (I recently installed the Akismet spam blocking plugin and celebrated my 10,000 caught spam this week!), but if you want to create a sense of community, encourage repeat readership and make your blog look like it actually gets traffic don’t make your readers jump through hoops just to post a comment (or worse, close commenting entirely), because believe me, we won’t! There a plenty of other blogs out there, just begging for our comments.
If you have a blog and want more comments, set up your settings so it’s easy for us to do so. In my WordPress settings I unchecked An administrator must approve the comment (regardless of any matches below) and checked Comment author must have a previously approved comment. That means, anyone can write a comment, but if you’re a first-time commenter, I must first approve it before it gets published. After that, any comment you leave will automatically be published on my blog.
To continue my story, I felt bad for being so critical of Stephanie’s blog and dismissing her so quickly; I sent her an email about the situation. She thanked me for letting her know (she didn’t know) and she changed her blog settings. Now she’s back on my list of favorites.
So what do you think — do I contact the guilty party (the blogger at the outset, who, by the way, brands herself as an online marketing expert) or do I let her learn the hard way (or perhaps she’ll get that I’m referring to her when she reads this)?
Well Chris, I have to agree. I’m not a fan of a one way blog conversation LOL! I enjoy reading articulate, thought provoking posts – but if I’m asked to register for a particular blog, I really consider if it’s worth it.
I don’t mind having a TypePad, WordPress, or Blogger account… but when someone restricts the comments to their specific blog, it does make me wonder what their motive is…
Now, I do moderate comments on my own blog. I do this because of the spam factor. However, I usually approve comments within 24 hours (usually a lot less).
So, I say, if you really enjoyed the blog, contact the writer – it may be another case of them not knowing what’s up… or – it might be nice to just know what their thought process is…
I think if the blog owner is articulate and
Hello Christina!
I completely agree with letting people freely comment! I have a blog website and for me, people commenting is exciting. I don’t want a simple step like; “please sign in” drive the people who are interested away.
The way I look at it is, these people who are commenting on my website could eventually be clients of mine.
Commenting is such a good way to interact with other VAs as well.
Thanks for the great post!
Trina Lamarche
http://www.efficientva.com
http://www.vaassistant.com
I couldn´t agree more! I can´t count the times I have jumped away from a blog because you are required to sign in just to post a comment.
My other pet peeve is Blogspot blogs that don´t allow “others”. For some reason, I can´t get into Blogger and have been unable to set up an account, so if a blogspot blog only allows registered users, I can´t comment!
That being said, I do moderate comments on my blog, but I don´t think that it is too much to ask for someone to wait half an hour or so (I am constantly checking) for their comment to go live.
Hi Cristina, I can understand your frustration. I think a lot of times the problem stems from anti-spam measures. The spammers have made it next to impossible to have comments as open as we’d like. I’ve had to invest quite a bit in site programming to deal with the spam problem. Ugh — they’re awful, those spammers!
Anita
Hi Cristina,
Before I posted here I had to check my own blog and make sure I wasn’t guilty of this also!
I have decided to moderate comments because of spam, but I ran through the rest of my settings just in case I had missed something else that would make it difficult for others to comment on my blog.
What do you know – I had turned off the option for email notification when someone posts a comment. Thank you for the reminder to make things as user-friendly as possible. It’s always the goal, but sometimes we forget how they see it.
Denise
[...] Want to know what people REALLY think when they have to sign in to comment on your blog? Cristina Favreau doesn’t hold back in her post How to Lose Me as a Blog Reader. If you’re still asking people to sign in before commenting, this post may change your mind. If so, Cristina tells you how to adjust your WordPress settings to open the comment gates. [...]
I couldn’t agree more! Leaving comments should be made as easy as possible.
A while back I someone rewarded me a link to one of my articles. When I visited and wanted to comment on his/her post, it was utterly impossible to leave comments. The box was there (and very prominently as well), but when I submitted I got some sort of message that only registered users where allowed to comment. But there was NO link to register at all.
Trying to be helpful I went looking for other ways to contact the blogger (mail, contact form or whatever), but there was nothing to be found.
I had no choice but to give up. Not surprisingly there were no comments at all on this blog.
I love comments, I don’t even moderate the first ones
Akismet catches most spam, manually removing the ones that do slip through is not that much work.
I think a lot of people just plan don’t know. That is what you ran across, and in my experience most people just haven’t learned blogging etiquette and don’t know were to look.
Plenty of articulate people with a have great writing voice and like the blog outlet, but don’t know much about computers or blogging. That is just my experience. I have yet to come across someone with those options set on purpose.
I never thought of it quite this way. I’ve seen many nasty comments added to blogs, so when I recently created my own blog, I decided to “moderate” in order to avoid unsuitable comments. I wasn’t looking to avoid comments that disagreed with mine thoughts, just ugly, unsuitable comments (i.e. profane). After reading your post and a few of the comments that followed, I have changed my blog to “unmmoderated”, since I DO want to connect with people and encourage comments. Thanks, for the insight!
[...] Savvy Entrepreneur has taken me to task for requiring registration on the blog prior to accepting comments, so I have [...]