Users must be logged in to comment – Yay or Nay?

Personally? There’s no quicker way to cause me to NOT leave a comment. Too much hassle, I just move on.

What will happen if you disable it? You’ll get more comments. ??

You’ll also probably want to look into some of the antispam plugins, but since most spam is via trackbacks, perhaps you’re already running some?

No I dont use it.

Why not? Because I think people are a lot like me — and I dont like to, and, in fact, wont register, just to post a passing comment. But then, I am generally blog-unfriendly and have very sites that I actually read with any routine.

What happens if you disable it?

The planets collide.

Seriously, what do you think happens? People can post comments without registering.

If you ask me, the purpose of that option, in the beginning was to thwart anonymous commenter spam. That was, of course, before Askimet, and spam karma, and the, literally, 100000’s of other ways one can manage spam.

Since spam is manageable now (notice I didnt say stoppable) it’s really not necessary to force people to register _just_ to comment.

I run SK2 and Akismet, which captures almost all spam on my current set-up. I’m going to disable that option now, I just wanted some, ah, encouragement from the forum first. Now it’s your fault if everything goes haywire! Ha. Kidding, I just wanted to see if people had a big spam problem with that turned off, or hated the fact that no one registered to be your friend (oh wait this isn’t myspace, mmmmmkay).

My evidence backs up the fact that it discourages commenting. I get comments from people who Register > Log-in > Post a comment once, but they virtually never return to leave another comment with the same log-in name, even though I know the people view the site again. Those auto-generated passwords are hard to remember, and the Comment form itself is so hidden when not-logged in. I assume if I disable that, the Comment form will appear at all times. More comments, how exciting!

Thanks for the Handy reply! and whoami answering several of my threads

I should add also, that in 2 years time, I’ve come across way too many individuals on here asking for ways to “harvest” commenter’s e-mails, be they registered or otherwise.

Since registering on a WordPress blog means I need to provide a real e-mail address, I’m VERY careful about those blogs I do register on. Leaving an anonymous comment on a passing site means I can provide a fake e-mail — I know some people wont like that, but then, you know, thats sorta too bad, since I am the one that has to deal with the consequences should I use a real one that gets harvested.

Sites I trust, people that I know, I have no problem using a real e-mail to post an anon. comment.

One more question — isn’t this option selected By Default?

It would be nice to have a little more description of the magnitude of the choice, in the Admin interface or ReadMe, as opposed to just tucking away a default option and assuming every blogger worth his salt will know “everyone changes that, man”.

I know its late but I agree with the above ^^ ^^, took me a few months before I even realized the option was set.

I have the option “Users must be registered and logged in to comment” turned on, but I still get comment spam, and I don’t understand how it is being submitted as it doesn’t seem to be coming from a registered user.

Is this a bug in wordpress, that it allows comments to be submitted without being a logged in registered user? Is there any way for me to stop it from happening?

When I do a test myself, where I log in as a different user and submit a comment, the email I receive has:
Author :
E-mail :
URL :
Whois :
Comment:
but when I receive the comment spam, it has
Website :
URL :
Trackback excerpt:

I think I possibly used to have
“Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.)”
turned on, though I have it turned off now. Is this what is allowing comment spam to reach me even though I have told it to only allow comments from logged in registered users?

Is there any way to turn this off for all existing posts, I don’t want to have to go through over 600 posts one by one!

stevei,

thats not comment spam or a comment, thats trackback spam and its sent via a trackback.

and yes, thats the cause, (your having it enabled at one time). Ticking it off today/yesterday/etc.. is not retroactive.

Agreed with everything said above. You probably shouldn’t do it because it will discourage people from commenting, but at the same time use a spam filter. If you are using your blog hosted by wordpress, just use Akismet. But if you are self hosting I’d recommend WP-SpamFree. Hope this helps!