1 Registered users with mee.nu, or registered to comment on your site specifically? I wasn't going to create a mee.nu account (it's not like I need another email/web addy) but if that's what it takes to be allowed commenting privileges...

2 Thanks Steven.

3 GreyDuck, there are a couple of ways in the system to restrict commenters, but the easiest one is to set it to require a registered mee.nu user.  There's no site-specific registration.

4 Pixy: Thanks for the answer. No worries, then: I'll go ahead and sign up. Maybe I'll find a use for it some day other than giving me the ability to pester Steven with comments. *wry grin*

5

Cool. And we commenters register where?  (Don't say "At the link, dummy," because that's not a user registration, it's just to get a mee.nu website.)

Hmmmm. Wait, I think I get the picture here..... 

6 Wow. Talk about being ninja'd....

7

I tried again, thinking maybe I had misunderstood something about the registration.  No joy.

"Sorry, we are currently only allowing sites with mee.nu addresses. We plan to offer support for personal domains soon." 

So for the time being, to comment on any "restricted" mee.nu blog, I have to have a mee.nu blog?

8 Yes.  The blog is free but mandatory.

I thought of changing that, but there's some code that assumes that the user has a site as well, so for now, yeah, you have to have a mee.nu blog.

9 I'll change the error so that it actually detects a blank site field.

10 I'm in. Maybe I'll even think of something to use the site for...

11 Went ahead and signed up too. Wanted one anyway. Now to figure out how HTML works...

12 Just testing something out. . .

13 A mandatory blog is not unusual. LJ does the same thing. In Pixy's shoes I would not strain myself trying to untie the registration from the domain, profile page, etc.

BTW, I have my doubts about the concept of commenting. Sure, it allows me to make a fool of myself in comments at Chizumatic easily, in fact the commenting facility makes it positively tempting, but is this a good thing?

I am thinking about experimenting with the concept of "Blogosphere is my comment board" by disallowing comments, leaving fewer comments, and placing more links. It seems to work fine for political bloggers like Instapundit, so... In fact the Chizumatic itself ran without comments for years.

14

From my own personal experience, the reason it worked for me when I was hosting it on my own server was that I had direct access to the Apache referer logs. My browser "home" page is a summarized referer log on my own server, and I look(ed) at it quite a lot.

That meant that if someone linked to me, I'd see it and could respond if I felt I wanted to.

Trackbacks would perform the same function -- except that trackbacks are essentially useless now because of spammer abuse.

Running a blog on a hosting service (like this one) without access to trackbacks or any kind of access to referer logs makes it nearly impossible to even notice when someone else has linked to you. So far, my only way of realizing it has been when it's someone whose blog I read, and I happen to visit.

Pixy is promising us a statistics page, but it isn't up yet. (He's been busy with more important things.)

Comments here have gotten out of control a couple of times, but I've been applying the Giuliani "broken window" approach to enforcement, and it seems to be working pretty well. There's only been one commenter who has been outright abusive and needed to be banned, and I had to ask Pixy to take care of it.

I certainly understand that it's a pain to have to register in order to comment, but with the software here as it currently exists that gives me a degree of control without having to beg Pixy for help in egregious cases. And I don't want to be in a position of being forced to switch as a result of the next abusive commenter that shows up. I won't give him that satisfaction.

I certainly don't intend to be tyrannical about using the ban-hammer, but I will continue to use the "broken window" philosophy to deleting comments and closing threads.

15 I see. Thanks for the explanation.

Perhaps Pixy can cook up something regarding logs in due time, as a part of the further site development. Mere statistics is probably too coarse...

BTW, I found that Google pretty good at finding backlinks. Try this:
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&tab=wb&q=chizumatic&btnG=Search+Blogs

16

It's not really very good. I know of at least two recent links to here that are not on that list.

17 Not a problem ... I'll just handle it like live journal ... a page that consists of nothing but a forward to my blog.