Ironically I would agree :-)

Switch the option off to comment without having logged in *search for registration^^*
 

I dislike the idea to be honest.

Why? Look through the comments and see who posted inflamatory comments. Notice how registered users posted stuff like that just like anonymous ones.

For example, the commentor who called for anonymous posting to be turned off said stuff like:

"TBC bitching is way ahead of the curve"

"2.1 is an amazing patch, and Black Temple is a VERY small part of it and that's what you choose to focus on? For shame."

"A lot of these comments are absurd, btw."

Up to that point I felt the comments were quite level headed. Now all this is posted by a registered blogger.

That same poster troll baited later with stuff like

"Was the store out of all copies of Elder Scrolls?"

Or even later:

"Wait, so I'm not being constructive but you posting bald faced lies about this patch somehow is constructive?"

That in response to someone just trying to describe their experience, albeit anonymously.

"To be kind, you are incredibly misled."

Another registered blogger wrote this:

"Quite playing the damn game and go be a LOTR fanboy like tobold if you hate it so much."

Yes there are apparently two anonymous trolls who posted:

"I completely agree, that patch is worthless, oh wait that what Tobold would like to hear."

"This blog is now officially about how a wannabe journalist turned into a troll."

And another (possibly the same):

"This blog is now officially about how a wannabe journalist turned into a LOTR fanboy."

So in conclusion, by turning off anonymous posting you get 2 ad hominem posters who are anonymous and keep two ad hominem posters who are registered.

But I see a good number (more than 2) anonymous posters that are actually constructive.

I fear that just deleting trolling comments is the best way to go, but that's a lot of work.

The advantage is that you actually get rid of trolls whether they are registered or not and allow people anonymity who chose that (or just don't want to bother to register) that comment sensibly.

But on the other hand I have sympathy. I have started a blog and start off having disabled all commenting, registered users or not. Which is a pity because the more aggressive folks out there win over constructive remarks that way. But for blogging it means non of this hassle.

So basically, I don't see a good solution. I like anonymity but registering won't actually change that too much anyway. And I'm just not convinced that it'll solve the trolling and flaming issue.
 

You're always going to have jerks making stupid nonsensical comments about anything you do. If this helps keep the BS down that you have to deal with, I'd say go for it.

I understand peoples wishes to remain anonymous but if you're going to be critical of someone you should at least have the *coughs* to leave your name/title/nickname.
 

There shouldn't even be any criticizing people as far as I am concerned. Just discuss the issue.

What is the point of being critical of the person for having a view or opinion? Name/title/nick posted or not? It's all not constructive in either case and certainly not helpful to keep a civil discourse up.
 

I think that a good solution would be a system similar to www.wowhead.com. This site uses a comment rating system to bury stupid comments and highlight the interestings parts. Thus, the moderating is done by your readers.

Djaw
 

Unfortunately blogger doesn't support comment rating, I don't think.
 

All registering will slow down is spamming, and not really even that, but you certainly have a right to run your blog as you see fit.

I'll probably register no matter what you decide to do.

You see, I've come to resent other anon posters being able to take credit for my witty insight, and piercing observations )))

PS, Tobold should just start a message board and be done with it. Easy for me to say, of course )))
 

I say turn on the security. abel makes some good points, however not allowing anonymous simply means that you can track and attribute comments from the same poster to the same poster more easily as a reader. Of course, someone could, if they really wanted, go off and create dozens of Blogger/Google accounts to be able to post semi-anonymously, but you can never stop a person truly determined toward a goal.
 

For me personally it doesn't really matter if I have to log in to comment, as long as there's some kind of cookie so I don't have to do it each time. ;)

Even though trolling will not disappear completely by removing anon comments I think it could become a bit less so it's a logical thought. Sure, go ahead and activate it.
 

I'm fine either way. I usually just use the anonymous posting option because I'm too lazy to log into blogger. I doubt it will stop rude commentary (that's a problem with the internet in general) but maybe it will stop an impulsive comment or two by forcing the user to login first.
 

I have no time at all for anonymous commenters but I think that forcing people to register in order to comment is too extreme.

Many genuine comments are spur of the moment thoughts from people who may not have a Blogger id. Forcing these people to register will probably dissuade them from leaving any comment at all.

Under the current system non-registered commenters can still identify themselves using the "other" option so there really is no excuse for anonymous comments. I would favour keeping the current system but deleting anonymous comments as a matter of policy.

In order to cover yourself legally you should probably include a terms of service on your blog which gives you permission to delete comments: See point 7 of http://www.avivadirectory.com/blogger-law/

By the way most wordpress blogs I read force you to enter a name and a hidden email address inorder to leave a comment - pity Blogger doesn't have that feature.
 

I throw my real first name in here everytime I post, but aren't I still anonymous?

Unless we're all sitting at a table together, it's anonymous regardless of what it says above our post. Why disreagard every anon post, mbp? It's all anonymous.

Tobold, I'm new to reading and commenting on your blog, and it's yours to do with as you please. But I don't see any reason to change it. The people who make stupid comments make themselves irrelevant by what they say, not how they identify themselves. And the intelligent posters/readers know trash from insight.

Yesterday hit a nerve, and like any issue that does, it brings good and bad posters alike. I wouldn't sweat it.
 

I'm all for turning off the anonymous commentaries.
 

I support Anonymous commenting because I don't use home computer. I refuse to login from public computers where they are riddle with Keylogger,etc.

As log as it comments are not "SPAM", "Gold selling", etc, you can just keeep them. On avg you get 30 comments a day anyway.

Some of your worse critics are the registered users. This brings the question of censorship. I am against any kind of censorship.
 

Id say jerks are more likely to make accounts. Because some people like to "hear" themselves talk, and they like to do it alot. Passer-by's with one off comments like myself, are less likely to make accounts.

In conclusion, your damned if you do and damned if you dont.
 

I think you should leave anonymous commenting on. For instance, I would never have left this opinion if I had to register to do it :).

Seriously though, I doubt having a registered name is going to stop ignorant comments--I think the psychological power of the internet to make people feel like they are faceless is far greater than forcing them to register a name can overcome. People will say things on the internet that they would never say to someone's face, that unfortunately seems to be the nature of the beast.

I would note that I think you don't even really have to sign up for Blogger to have a name though, I never have but it seems to have pulled my gmail info or something because I could post this non-anonymously if I wanted to.
 

@Chris you make a good point that we are all in some sense anonymous (my real name isn't mbp for example) but I still stick to my opinion that people who don't put some name on their comments don't deserve to be read. I don't mind if people use a pseudonym as long as they leave some name and hopefully stick with it.

First off it is a matter of common courtesy. Leaving comments without signing them strikes me as the height of rudeness.

Secondly a name on a comment gives extra information that is useful to the reader in assesing that comment. The reader can assess the comment in light of previous remarks made by the same poster. Obviously if the poster has a blog or other web presence then so much the better.
 

Forcing users to log in would have a benefit that people could skip past known trolls by name. "Oh, not this guy again." On the other hand, I find many of the anonymous comments just as informative / interesting as the ones from registered users. While removing junk responses takes time and effort regardless of who posted it, it sounds like you're already checking for junk posts anyway.

Many of the comments in yesterday's WoW thread were aberrations in an otherwise civil forum. Unless you're doing a lot more editing than I'm aware of, I think the anonymous poster option is fine as is.
 

I don't have an account because I read/write this at work, and I don't really want work tracking me down, somehow (paranoia, maybe).

The WOW forums are not anonymous, and yet the level of bile and hatred pervading almost every thread there, shows that having a 'name' doesn't make a difference to posters' behaviour.
 

I'm ambivalent. I have a blogger account, but I rarely use it as what I post as, because it's from registering for a spinning community blog. Not exactly relevant to this blog :p. Instead, I use the 'other' option, and give my personal blog identifier, which at least occasionally talks about games.

Does blogger let you permit both Blogger and 'Other' while not permitting the truly Anonymous? It's a fine distinction, but 'Other' might better encourage an identifier.

As others have said, anonymous commenters aren't all trolls, and registered commenters sometimes are trolls. Still, while my blog permits anonymous, it screens them first; pity blogger doesn't seem to support that.
 

Blogger, for whatever reason, no longer likes my login.

Whether this blog bans anon comments or not may not affect me much. I'm personally finding the blog less interesting because the comments seem to be moving in the LOTRO direction. Tobold's recent WoW comments seem fixated on the endgame -- which is not actually being played by him anymore. "I played WoW for X years, X hours a day" and "I raided back when 60 was the cap" and "I hit 70 and completed Kara" will carry a blogger for a while -- but not playing for weeks or months and now entirely missing a major patch inevitably would make *anyone* more and more out-of-touch. So the blog comments seem to be moving in the direction of theorycrafting, and those of us who are actually playing the game are seeing growing disparity between the patch-note-theorycrafting and what we are actually seeing while we play WoW.

So I'm reading WoW blogs by people who are actually playing WoW more, and this blog less. Who knows, I might even eventually cancel my subscription :P

I must point out that, IMO, the "troll baiting" on the thread below may have been initiated by Tobald when he said that he "failed to get interested enough to even try playing", then gave a critical three-paragraph preview. As a person who actually DID log on quickly noticed that the gold-spammers in chat are gone for now, and that the timers on the target are very nice, the criticisms 'felt' like an uncalled-for slam. I had a good overall first impression, even though my server was down until rather late on patch day. The more I play with the new timers, the more I like them.

Yet some people are quickly writing off 2.1 as a patch for raiders! This non-raider experienced otherwise. Again, a lot of that feels like a growing disconnect between theorycrafting from patch notes and actually playing.

Doeg
 

I think you can also comment if you have an active gmail account... could be wrong though.
 

I'm really starting to dislike every site expecting me to register yet another account to keep track of. I would rather you ban the IP of people who are acting childish. It's your choice, but I don't see that an identity made up at registration allows any better tracking than an anonymous identity.
 

People can create bogus blogger accounts if all they wanted to do was heckle so that doesn't solve your problem. I think what will work better at stopping trolls is to turn approval on. It will be more work for you but I think that's the only way to keep it clean.
 

I'm fine with either.

But hence i fear the trolls already have archieved their goal to get too much attention here, my friends...by feeding them constantly with this topic and discussion...next time i will put some rat poison into their popcorn before one of them will ever show up again...

Soc
 

See what is an interesting phenomenon though is how trolling, flaming or ad hominems come about.

Take Doeg above. His point is that Tobold placed a troll-bait hence more or less asked for being trolled.

I have seen this kind of argument frequently and I never really get it.

So someone writes "This and that didn't personally work for me" and later asks "Did it work for you?" and then they are called troll baiters because it turns out that some people disagree with him and choose to express it in forms of ad hominems? This is odd logic I really do fail to follow.

And no, Tobold didn't troll-bait anybody, even with the BT remark. I think it's a sensible discussion to ask if Zul'Aman or Black Temple should have been added first. Just from personal perspective, but without agendas or hate spewing. And of course it's just fine and swell to disagree. One can say that having the full lore in game provides you personally a great feeling. That'd be a perfectly sensible stance to hold. But to make anybody who scratches their head why BT now and not ZA now is worth flaming is certainly way beyond intelligent discussion.

To the same end saying that rep grinds aren't very interesting should also be just a personal observation and not read as a frontal assault on Blizzard or their developers. It's just a personal preference, why all those hateful overreactions?

I have tested 2.1 extensively on PTR including trying prison, Skettis and netherdrake quests, but instead of addressing this in the thread we get to read:

"Again, a lot of that feels like a growing disconnect between theorycrafting from patch notes and actually playing."

Even then, Tobold's point wasn't that 2.1 didn't deliver for anybody. His point was that it didn't deliver for him. Isn't that perfectly valid even if he never started a netherdrake quest? Wasn't it clear that Tobold was more interested in casually accessible raiding and content access (something that BT arguably doesn't provide)?

So we have come from what Tobold said to people flaming him over soloable content. There are a number of levels of indirection there, so it's weird.

I never understood why people generalize what others say so rapidly. Or throw comments by other posters into the same pot as someone else (just label them all fanboys and dismiss them with one grand stroke, certainly saves up on trying to understand others).

Is all this part of the dynamics why trolling and flaming is so rampant?
 

First, it is your personal choice. At the moment, you get heat from people who like WOW, liked/loved your Blog which exploded in subscriptions since you wrote well articulated, aimed at a more senior audience. Now you are turning away from WOW and towards LOTRO (for the time being, you have written quite a lot of criticism recently) and some people feel like you turned your love away from them and behave like a neglected child, screaming an kicking in their room.

To the subject: Leave Anonymous postings in, if you have doubts. People still have to to the menial process of typing in these nasty letters which don't refresh till the end of what you type so I always have to type them in twice, sometimes even thrice. This is hassle enough. Anyone who passes that stage-gate process should be wirth reading. Not always worth replying though. I assume you have a thick skin and can live with people flaming here.
 

This springs to mind
 

"A troll is someone who intentionally posts derogatory or otherwise inflammatory messages about sensitive topics in an established online community such as an online discussion forum to bait users into responding." (Wikipedia)

Typical troll behavior is vulgar and irrational, which is obviously unacceptable.

However, in the strictest sense, quite a lot of discussion was provoked by Tobald's comments (which I found to be negative), though it is also obvious that the comments fed off of each other to some degree. Some of the comments were blunt or harsh, but the comments didn't descend to what came to mind when I recall the trolling I've witnessed at other times in other places.

I have very much appreciated Tobald's reviews in the past because they were based upon actually loading, logging in, and playing an MMO. But I have read reviews in other places that left me feeling like the reviewer was commenting on the as-advertised game and had never gotten past the shrink-wrap. You probably will not have any problem guessing which review I valued, and which I ignored.

As for theorycrafting, it has its place.
But in my experience a few minutes of actual experience will prove more valuable than a few hours of theory.
"I read the patch notes, and I won't like it" just didn't cut it for me.

Doeg
 

It is your blog and nobody else's business. Do what will make you feel more confortable. The fewer uncivilized comments, the better.

PBR
 

Oh, something else. If registering had any impact on post quality, then bnet and foh would have low ratios of idiotic post, right?
 

My only thought is this will occasionally limit what I'm talking about. I've posted as anonymous a few times, when I have something I want to say that's somewhat negative about my guildmates, and would rather they not realize I'm talking about them. They may not read this blog, but in case they are I'd rather not create unneeded drama. That's about the only reason I would ever use the anonymous option. Maybe that's not enough of a reason to keep anonymous posts, but that's my 2 cents.
 

LOL 1 good thing came from all this. It got "Vlad" to enter his name like everyone else, instead of signing with it :)
 

Posted by mbp:

"First off it is a matter of common courtesy. Leaving comments without signing them strikes me as the height of rudeness."

I can agree with the idea here if not the extent; although not the height of rudeness, I concur that is is polite to engage someone on the same level they are engaging you. When interacting with someone that has given their identity, give them your identity to work with as well: reciprocity. However...

"Secondly a name on a comment gives extra information that is useful to the reader in assesing that comment. The reader can assess the comment in light of previous remarks made by the same poster. Obviously if the poster has a blog or other web presence then so much the better.

This is why I favor anonymity when I post. When you stay anonymous, it helps force people to solely engage your ideas, rather than judge your comments partly on their (potentially inaccurate) impressions of who you are. I mean, look at the recent comments we're talking about: a couple readers have been reading Tobold's posts about his decline in interest in WoW, and his surging interest in LoTRO. They then read reasonable comments about the patch, but because they are from Tobold they view it as unreasonable WoW-bashing. You can see the same thing happen whenever Tobold mentions Vanguard. More generally, a commenter who makes a poor initial impression may later be ignored when they do come up with something valid. A well-respected commenter might get away with boorish behavior because they've "banked up" good credit. I consider anonymity a partial shield against our very human impulse to judge first and comprehend later.
 

Go for it.
 

@kurlus - call me a noob, but I never knew what the 'Other' option meant. Now I know!