At any given time, roughly one-third of the entries under “Site Activity” consist of automatically-generated spam comments on blog posts that are as much as six months old. And after the first few comments, what useful comments there are are drowned in the flood of spam. For example, the blog post “diamonds and Kimberley process certificates,” with 8,015 comments, is so large that my browser can’t handle it. Would it be possible to implement a captcha for anyone commenting on blogs? I’m sure both the bloggers and the readers would greatly benefit.
No anonymous users should be able to comment . That would solve the problem of bots. Simple permissions issue.
And all blogs should be set to moderate comments by default, requiring the blog owner to CHOOSE to allow comments without moderation if that is their thing.
I would also suggest this for a mises blog, but if one is dead set on allowing anonymous users to comments, perhaps they could set up a “public” version of their blog on a free blogging service (such as Blogger) & sort of fork the entries a bit (where the more private mises blog is higher priority, and the public one keeps a few entries behind while advertising the more private one).
It depends on how much time one wants to spend on a blog though. If you’re more conerned with content rather than exposure, moderating comments is the way to go.