Hurdles to discussion

+1 to Ortwin Glück!

The greatest virtue of blogs is their support for discussion.  Putting silly barriers in the way of comments is counterproductive.

But Ortwin overlooks the worst case.  Sure, jumping through hoops is annoying.  But what’s altogether worse is sites that appear to accept comments, but when you’ve put the effort in require you to jump through hoops by stealth.  Worst: those whose hoops are insurmountable: one of those eye tests (aka captchas) which my client may not even display, or which I may be unable to solve.  Or blogs using blogger that expect you to send OpenID credentials, then throw up an error message when you do so.

For the record, no, this is not finger-pointing.  I made no attempt to comment on Ortwin’s blog.  Had I done so, I’m sure it would’ve been published with no problems.