Email for Comments?

Do Blogs Need Your Email When You Comment?

Short Answer: No.

Slightly Longer Answer: The point of having an email field in a comment form is to have a way for the site owner to contact the commenter. I do not believe that field is necessary and adds unnecessary complexity to your form. Complexity discourages people from commenting and in turn weakens your blog community.

View the full article at my other blog, minimali.st →

Usability Tip tags: , on Nov 14, 2009

3 Comments

  1. Monkeytail says: Dec 13, 2009

    Maybe I’am the first commenter because no one else wanted to provide his or her email =)

  2. Kevin says: Dec 13, 2009

    @Monkeytail –

    I did just contradict myself didn’t I. Thanks for braving it out and commenting through the unnecessary field :-)

  3. Phill Price says: Jan 28, 2010

    I agree; I can only assume that it stems from a thought that to have an email address you can’t be a spammer; an early 90s captcha I guess. In this age we should simply request authenticity another way; through OpenID or similar – although we’ll probably just end up with OpenID spammers…