Comments on: What happens when you take away the URL from a blog comment form?

By: Dr. Johnson

Dr. Johnson — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 16:44:42 +0000

As a brand-new blogger, I would welcome people to leave comments on my blog, even if it’s only for self-promotion. I can easily imagine, however, that the larger the blog, the more headaches the moderation causes. I think, in the long run, that’s a good problem to have.

Good job with the experiment.

By: Kyle Alm

Kyle Alm — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 17:25:23 +0000

I agree with your conclusions. Allowing a commenter to leave a link seems to be proper netiquette. Even if it is “nofollow.”

By: Jon Henshaw

Jon Henshaw — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 16:25:16 +0000

Robert, I would have only been surprised if the results showed that we were all spam robots

By: Darren Shaw

Darren Shaw — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 16:14:41 +0000

Interesting. I always leave the URL field off of the custom blogs I develop. I know it will reduce the amount of comments I get, and I actually think that’s a good thing. The URL incentive just encourages spam, and it also encourages low quality comments where the commenter is just trying to come up with something relevant to say, but doesn’t actually have anything to contribute to the conversation. Leaving the URL field off means dealing with a LOT less spam and useless “great post!” comments. The only downside I really see is losing that public reference point to who the commenter is. Perhaps I’ll start adding a twitter handle instead, but I’m still not convinced that the URL field on blog comments provides enough benefit to make it worth including. Sure, I’ll get fewer comments, but that’s fine. I don’t want comments that were only added for the link.

By: Robert Brady

Robert Brady — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 15:53:11 +0000

At least you can feel validated that your initial assumptions were correct. Unless you wanted to be surprised.

By: Jon Henshaw

Jon Henshaw — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 15:51:40 +0000

Charlie & Taylor, comment quality was slightly better, but I think there’s good user generated content to get from people who also want a link. Minus the blatant spammers, I think there’s an unwritten expectation that if you spend the time to provide a thoughtful comment, you want to be rewarded by a reference link, and I’m completely fine with that.

By: Jon Henshaw

Jon Henshaw — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 15:46:59 +0000

Sam, it was entertaining, as spam usually is. The spam bot activity wasn't that high. I think Akismet still caught most of it. But there were several comments left that didn't get caught as spam that had URLs. It was quite amusing to see these sites so blatantly exposed. One other caveat is that those comments were actually well written. And by well written, I don't mean they're winning an award for prose, but they were on topic and referenced the blog entry. That tells me that there's probably some custom software that aggregates feeds, and allows the user to read and comment without even visiting the blog. That's actually not difficult to code at all, so I think that's a very plausible assumption of how they were doing it.

By: Jason Jones

Jason Jones — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 15:43:13 +0000

Comment spam is a really tough one to crack… Even when I have implemented captchas and other forms of security I still find a pretty good share of comment spam making it through.

By: Charlie Southwell

Charlie Southwell — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 15:40:39 +0000

Very interesting experiment. I have taken to a moderating comments on my blogs before they go live now.

I would ask the question that Taylor did – were the quality of comments you received better because of removing it? Or were they all (or mainly) the spam comments with urls in them?

By: Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 15:37:00 +0000

Great experiment – always interesting to see if what you expect holds true when you actually apply changes. Thanks for sharing.

I think there are a couple more reasons to use the url field as well, but the most significant one that you listed is providing the reference point to the commenter. I click on these often to provide more context to the conversation when I’m following a thread. That could be achieved as well by requiring the user to sign in with an existing social media profile, but I’ve always found those too restrictive and think they hurt comment volume as well.