Today's post is guest written by Will from the blog Healthy Living for People and Planet Earth . The rabbit has nothing to say about Blogger. An explanation of what he is up to can be found here. I visit many Blogger or BlogSpot blogs. A few of my favorite bloggers use Google's Blogger platform. In fact one of the most frequent visitors and the top commentator on my blog is Anna, who uses Blogger for My Only Photo . So, I have nothing at all against the people who use that platform for their blogging. If I really like a Blogger site or the person writing the posts, I will go to the trouble of commenting no matter what. But if I am visiting a Blogger site for the first time and the pop up comment box is used on that site, I am gone, never to return. Some of the recent problems have been brought on by Google itself. As I wrote about in this article, in November of last year, Google, without notice, eliminated the ability for anyone to comment and link their name to their website. After the uproar caused by many articles like mine, Google added the open ID feature. This still did not quiet things down and as I wrote here , Google finally backtracked, allowing commentators to leave their name and URL with a comment. If you use Blogger, you should use the changes Google made and make it as easy as possible for your visitors to leave comments. To help you make sure you have your Blogger site set up correctly, here are a few friendly suggestions that have been shown to increase the number of people regularly visiting and commenting on BlogSpot blogs. First, don't use the pop-up comment box. This is the most important suggestion. If you start a new Blogger site, don't even think of using it, and if you do use it already, get rid of it today. Use the comment form that opens in its own new page. This form has the added helpful feature of a link to show the original post while you are commenting. Here is a link to the actual comment page being used on Anna's blog. I could make a list of reasons why you should not use the pop-up, but please just take my word on it, don't use it. Once you have the proper comment page in place, make sure you show the two boxes needed by those of use without Google or Blogger ID's. This allows commentators to use real names and websites by entering their name and URL. You can see those two boxes in the image in this post or at the full size image linked above. Please note that I don't mean the Open ID box. That is there also, but the additional radio button drop-down labeled "Name/URL" with the two boxes for "name" and "URL" must also be included. My last suggestion is that you absolutely do not use one of those captcha boxes on your blog comment form. I understand that spam comments are a real problem. I have been told that Google does not provide anything to stop spam comments. I find this hard to believe, but since I don't use Blogger, I will have to take the actual user's word for it. Those of us with self-hosted WordPress sites are spoiled by the Akismet plugin that comes with WordPress. I get hundreds, if not thousands of comment spam attempts every week. But with Akismet running, it is rare for even one to slip through. Because I have to help of Akismet, I don't need to moderate comments on my blog, but if you feel you must moderate in an effort to limit spam, do that rather than using a captcha box. If Blogger does not have any way other than a captcha box to stop spam, then I make this my final suggestion.... Every single person you know that uses Blogger should be asked to contact Google and ask them to put a tool in place to stop comment spam. Point to Akismet for WordPress as a good example. If a month goes by with no change, contact them again. Google tried to take the easy way out last fall by eliminating the name and URL boxes. That backfired on them and they listened to the hue and cry of their users. Maybe an uproar asking for a better way to stop comment spam will also get their attention. As a final, (and of course gentle), suggestion, you could always consider changing to a different blogging platform... like, maybe, WordPress. -Will

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Tags: blogger, blogspot, comments