I don’t think that’s an unreasonable position – after all, it’s just a comment. Every other blog does perfectly well by just taking your name and email/url.
So why does Performancing (who are “Helping Bloggers Succeed” btw) require me to sign up or f*** off? Maybe they should change their slogan to “Making Bloggers Suck Seed“?
As it happens, I wanted to post to the Performancing Firefox extension roadmap. (are you seeing this over @ Flock? You guys desperately need to get a roadmap for yourselves. Ask FactoryJoe for my thoughts on this.)
I was going to suggest that they add a spell checking facility to Performancing (I’m dyslexic, and as readers of my blog, you know how bad my spelling is!). But it looks like I should also add “unregistered blog commenting” too.
Pah. That won’t get you on Newsnight! 😉
???
Hi Ben, Nick from Performancing here.
There are a few reasons why we require a sign up to comment. You may not feel they’re good ones, but here they are anyway 🙂
* We find it an incredibly good way to fight spam
* Performancing is a community blog, with private messaging, forums and all kinds of other things. Registration is needed to use much of these things.
* We allow members to post stories for the homepage, personal blog posts and forum questions – so we need to know who’s who for a variety of administrative reasons
* We have a major blogging product coming out in February that you could not possibly use without having an account, so all the folks registered so far (about 1500 i think) have already done that – this is a small thing but it will help us launch our product
Im sorry you felt you couldn’T comment, but im glad i picked up your post anyway (ive been subscribing for a long time now). To address your point about spellcheck, no, it’s not in the roadmap for 1.1, but will almost certainly make it into 1.2
FWIW, you can grab the development version of spellbound and it will work seemlessly with PFF — that’s a little too much trouble for most, which is why I agree we need to intergrate it, but for now maybe that would help you out?
Im not dyslexic, but my spelling is attrocious, so it IS an item not far from the top of the list.
Regards
Nick
Hi Nick,
Thanks for leaving your comments (see, you didn’t need to register here — ho ho!)
I sort of, ish, understand where you are coming from – now that you have furnished me with the facts.
Perhaps then you should make it clearer what you are actually signing up for. Because to me it felt like I was just signing up to comment.
I don’t take your point about spam – I think there are enough automated mechanisms in place to sort that out.
I would also add, as a blogger myself, I’m not interested at all in your feature set of “private messaging, forums and all kinds of other things. Small pieces, loosely joined and all that.
(I don’t want to sound obnoxious but I’ve got email for private messaging and my blog does as a good job of community converastion instead of forums).
In fact as advocates of blogging I would have thought offering forums etc is somewhat counter-productive?
I’ll certainly keep an ear out for your ‘major blogging product’ in Feb! Best of luck with that.
Will also check out Spellbound, I’m sure I can hack it!
Cheers
Ben
The Newsnight ‘gag’ was an obscure reference to the somewhat bizarre appearance of Flock on Newsnight recently.
I took the inference of your piece to be that Performancing was snapping at Flock’s heels…
But it’ll never appear on Newsnight because it’s not pretty and shiny with a funky blue logo.
I assumed all of this could be inferred from my seven word comment. I can be odd like that.
Ben, i wish i could seperate comments from the other stuff, but I can’t.
Users are indeed signing up to comment, we think it’s a good thing, but of course not everyone feels the same.
As for forums, well they may be a bit older than the blog format but they’re a very effective way to ask questions and get help. Some of our members may not have an audience to ask (if asking on their new blog) for example. And 99% of all questions get answered by members and the Performancing team so we think it’s a great way to foster a sense of community around the idea of professional blogging (blogging for commercial purpose).
I’ll make sure you’re on the preview list for the Feb launch if you like, just drop me your email addy at nick@performancing.com and i’ll also get our 1.1 version of PFF to you a week early 🙂
Take care
Nick
Wheee! I’m posting a comment without registering!
(INSERT PROFOUND STATEMENT HERE)
This is spam. Take that!
I googled ‘I refuse to register with every blogsite’ and ended up here. Insert resentful pout. And it’s only gotten worse.
How accomplish I create a website with minimum before no advertsing for free?