Dan C. Sharp · @DanCSharp
9th Sep 2012 from Twitlonger
Site owners: Please stop making people create an account just to comment on something. This is an annoyance. I would love to engage in meaningful discussion but am instantly turned off when I have to create an account at such-and-such website just to comment on the blog post, video, article, or whatever content.
Huffington Post makes you do this, and so does LifeHacker. These are otherwise great sites. I praise sites that use a commenting system like Disqus where you only have to sign in to something you already have like Facebook, twitter, etc to write a comment.
I'm sure there are some pros for getting people to sign up which I didn't consider, but you'd get more comments if you used a more convenient system for commenting. But if you run a wildly popular site like LifeHacker... you probably don't need anymore comments than what you've got already. Maybe its a good way to not flood the page with comments, I don't know.
LiveFyre, Disqus, Facebook, etc are plenty good at taking care of spam. They have an option for flagging, and banning people from writing comments on your site.