Case Study: BloggingTips and Comment Registrations
By Ronald Huereca on Jan 11, 2008.
One of the first posts I wrote for this blog back in April of ‘06 was how Spam is a reader’s problem too. One of things I didn’t mention on the post was that some bloggers disable comments due to the high number of spam-comments received.
On December 13th, 2007 — about a month ago — BloggingTips decided to disable their comments (due to spam) for everyone except registered users. Within this post I will point out statistically what occurred to their comments section as a result. This post will cover the comments entered from November to today (January 11th, 2008). As of today, their comment section is up for everyone. I am unsure when comments were re-enabled for non-registered users.
A Little Research…
I went through all of BloggingTips posts from November 1, 2007 to January 11, 2008. I recorded the number of comments made for each post. The December 13th date is when comments were disabled, so some of my research is between December 13th through January 11th to see how things changed during that month.
Comments Trend Throughout the Time Period
I used Excel to graph out the actual comments per post and looked for any trends in commenting behavior. And if you look closely, comments actually increased after the announcement was made about comments being disabled to un-registered users. However, towards the end of December and early January, comments dove downwards. This could possibly be due to the holiday effect.
Click the image for a larger view.
Average Comments Per Post
A more revealing trend is the figure of comments per post. Listed below are the average number of comments per post for each month:
- November: 6.29
- December: 3.24
- January: 2.22
Again, these numbers could be due to the holidays, but I believe comment registrations played a factor. Since it is not known when comment registrations were not required, it is tough to speculate on what actually went down.
Click the image for a larger view.
Conclusion
When BloggingTips stopped comments from un-registered users, I was kinda heartbroken. I didn’t want to see such a good blog go down what I consider a dark path. Instead of writing about it then, I wanted to see what would happen down the line. I noticed only a few days ago that comments were back up and running as normal.
The downward trend of BloggingTips can either be attributed to the holidays, comment restrictions, or both. I’ve attached the raw data at the end of this post for you to have a look for yourself and perhaps make your own conclusions. I personally would have to attribute the downward trend to the comment registrations seeing that the downward trend still continues into January. I’ll plan to post an update to this post at the end of February to see if the trend has reversed.
If any of the BloggingTips authors happen to read this, please weigh in on what you thought happened.
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Interesting you should post about this today, I’ve just removed “Users must register to comment from my blog” forgot I’d turned the option on the first place really.
Not sure what effect it will have in the coming weeks, probably an increase in spam – but hoping Akismet can take care of mos tof that!!
Comment by Full Time Blogger — January 12, 2008 @ 6:32 am
Full Time Blogger,
Do let us know what happens as a result of the change. Akismet will catch some, but not all unfortunately.
Comment by Ronald Huereca — January 12, 2008 @ 4:00 pm
[...] happens when you close comments to unregistered users? The number of comments goes down. However, there is always the possibility that the Holidays had something to do with the change as [...]
Pingback by This was the Week that Was, Vol. 29 | Sephy's Platzish — January 14, 2008 @ 10:11 pm
Sorry for the delay in replying to this article, I only found the post today
You did some good research on this. Unfortunately, due to some circumstances, some of this info you have is inaccurate.
Comments did decrease after I introduced a registration policy, probably by about 50%, maybe a little lower. I then tested out 3 or 4 spam blockers (wordpress plugins). I decided on two spam blockers and I removed the need for registration. I think I did this about a week and a half after introducing registration but I didn’t make an announcement about it so I’m not 100% sure. I usually only have to set about 2 or 3 comments to spam, before that it was crazy with spam being published every 30 mins.
However, these spam blockers dropped comments considerably and I wasn’t sure why. A few weeks later I was getting concerned about the lack of comments and I found that one of the spam blockers was stopping practically everything. I ended up going through hundreds of spam and non spam comments and I approved lots and lots of legitmate comments.
Spam is no longer a major problem at BloggingTips but it still gets a lot of spam from made for adsense sites and adult sites.
One things for sure, spammers create a lot of problems for blog owners.
Comment by Kevin Muldoon — February 3, 2008 @ 2:51 pm
@Kevin,
Thanks for weighing in. Spam-blocking problems do present difficulty for bloggers. We’ve had our share of problems here regarding comments getting blocked.
I would recommend trying WP SpamFree. It’s worked magically since I’ve installed it here.
Comment by Ronald Huereca — February 3, 2008 @ 4:09 pm
Ive not used that one. Im using Math Comment Spam Protection. The plugin which caused problems for me was ‘Defensio Anti-Spam’.
Comment by Kevin Muldoon — February 3, 2008 @ 4:15 pm
Sweet blog. I never know what I am going to come across next. I think you should do more posting as you have some pretty intelligent stuff to say.
I’ll be watching you
Comment by sponnateaxasp — June 3, 2009 @ 9:28 pm