Comment by franze | Hacker News Reader

Comment by franze | Hacker News Reader

i did some simple number crunching some time ago (> 8 months ago) on some clients sites and on a few private and friendly (which gave me access to their data) web-properties. it wasn't a big sample (6 sites all in all) but well, it's the data i had. outcome:

using fb comments - on average over all sites - always increase the valid comments you will get - and compared to old wordpress-standard-installations, decreases spam (the difference was between "a lot of spam" and "nothing")

i did not apply a quality metric, but reading over the (valid, not spam) comments i could not determine a (subjective) trend in either (good / stupid) direction.

yeah, i'm not a big fan of fb comments either, but well, if your blogs goal is to get comments (for whatever reason) then i would advise for the fb comment plugin.

and: it would be cool if you prove me wrong (with data).

i think this is a good time as any to quote Jim Barksdale, former CEO of Netscape: "If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine."

I think it's just the vocal minority here voicing their opinion. Franze you mention all great points with data to back it up (I've noticed the same fwiw).

WRT to SEO, anonymity, posting on your feed and notifications.. FB comments are crawlable, You can still remain anonymous with FB comments (sign-in with a yahoo account, etc.) and you can skip posting it on your feed and I've been notified everytime someone has liked/replied to a comment I've made using Facebook comments. More so than Wordpress, who wants to subscribe to a popular author and constantly get notifications throughout the day whenever anyone makes a comment??

Your data do also inherently self-select unless you're conducting your research very carefully. Once you throw up a "FB required for comments" requirement, you're going to start shooing away many people who'd otherwise be interested in participating. Some/many will simply never come back.

FB has a penetration of roughly 50% of the population in first world developed nations, and that seems to be its zenith (usage has actually started falling in the US and other early-adopter regions). So you're excluding roughly half your potential participants.

How the FB usage pattern distributes across your target/desirable population is of course another question. I don't have the answers on that.

as i said before: i would love that somebody comes up with a better study and proves my mini sample wrong, sadly i know none.

i did a similar research of fb enabled signeups vs. non fb signups (on desktop web apps) - outcome: if you enable signups via fb, you get more signed up users.

i think the pro/con fb comments/signups discussion should be based on data (data that is easy to get on our own webproperties) and not on opinions.

"compared to old wordpress-standard-installations"

Well, on my own CMS I had one single spam comment so far, and a few anonymous ones. generally not many comments, but no spam worth speaking of either. The captcha is nothing more complex than 'Please enter "14" in the field below.'. (with a different number between 10 and 99 each time) Keeps bots out, doesn't bother people.

Context is everything. Your method is great for low traffic sites. Sites with higher traffic are harder to block, because spammers specifically modify the robots to scrape the number and input it.

My phpBB forums was swamped with spam for example, and when I installed a wordpress blog no human other than me ever read, I got plenty of spam too. Yes, I have a low traffic site, a few dozen visitors a day, but still - the difference between using off-the-shelf and my own is HUGE. If I had a higher traffic sites, bots would make more effort, so I would make the captcha more complex. So far I didn't need to, which is kind of the point. Bots go for low-hanging fruit.

I do the same thing as you on my personal blog. About once a year a human spends a couple days analyzing my site, doing hundreds of post test runs, and defeating my custom spam blocker. My blocker notifies me about this and by the time he deploys it in the spam helper software he sells, I have already blocked the new attack. Custom solutions are of course not available to those who can't program, but for those who can it's a great solution that allows for anonymous comments without tracking or violating the person's privacy.

Also, the highest quality comments from real people and least spam I have seen anywhere on the internet are on Hacker News and on Reddit. Guess what both sites have in common? Anonymous hassle-free posting. The Hacker News sign up page contains the least amount of information needed to sign up possible - alias and password - and nothing more. It rivals the Google home page in its simplicity and functionality. Meanwhile discussion boards with elaborate "real names", "track you" and "exotic captcha" solutions are riddled with spam and heavy on both inane and trollish comments, showing that spammers motivated by profit are not deterred by complex sign ins, only legitimate users are.

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