glenn mcdonald launches vF, an online community of sorts with this self-effacing message:
A successful online community needs a coherent focus, and wide and/or well-targeted visibility. This community has neither. But that needn’t stop you.
He wrote his own forum software, which has a neat and simple method of keeping comment spam at bay:
- The forum presents the user with a comment form. The user must provide a valid e-mail address for verification purposes.
- When the user clicks “post”, the comment doesn’t appear in the forum until the user clicks on a link in a verification e-mail sent by the forum system.
- Once verified, a cookie is stored in the user’s browser indicating that further posts from the browser can be trusted (i.e. no more need to repeat the verification procedure).
With the additional step of a captcha, this would be a nice way to for current blog software to stem the flow of comment spam, while allowing the user to bypass having to verify his identity for each post.