As you may or may not be aware, when commenting on this blog you can tick a box to subscribe to subsequent comments on the entry in question.
Nine times now, people have opted to subscribe to comments without entering their email address. Given that the text accompanying the checkbox says "Notify me of followup comments via e-mail", it is not apparent how these people (I assume they number more than one, but probably less than nine) thought their notifications would arrive. More importantly, the way the plugin manages subscriptions means that I actually can't remove the blank subscriptions, so they just sit there and aggravate me.
I have now reverted to the original comment verification settings of this blog, which require both the name and email address fields to be filled in. The email address will not be displayed to anyone but me, and obviously you don't have to use a real name or even a real email address, but until I can work out how to purge the subscription manager (or somehow be convinced that people are intelligent enough to do things properly) you will just have to type those extra few characters. If you use a sensible web browser you can get it to remember your details for you, so you only have to type them once.
While all this fiddling about was going on I also enabled an OpenID plugin, which allows you to link your comment to (for instance) your Livejournal or other-blog identity (and has the additional benefit of ensuring that your comment will not be marked as spam or held for moderation). I hope to improve the user-friendliness of this sometime soon, as its usefulness is currently not at all obvious. I do have the option of allowing OpenID-verified comments to be posted without a name and email address, but I think we can all see where that would lead. None of that!1
Update, 01/07/09: Due to an unfathomable and unrelenting flood of spam comments on this entry only, I am disabling comments. Akismet is kind enough to catch all of them for me, but it makes wading through in search of false positives an impossible task.
- Or any of the others! [↩]
