I’m seeing this plugin in LOTS of blogs that I’m reading and commenting to and I wasn’t really that much concerned about it, initially. However when I started commenting again on lots of blogs as part of my back to blogging tasks, I started getting annoyed with this plugin. Why is that so?
Confirm you are not a spammer
What I’m talking about is this plugin called Anti-Spambot created by GrowMap and Andy w/c are people that I know and respect a lot. The way this plugin works is that there’s a checkbox in a comment form and before you can submit your comment, you will need to tick the checkbox to indeed confirm that you are not a spammer. How much sense does that make?
Well its not really that much of a big deal for me actually. I just find that its a workflow killer. I mean, you’re typing comments and doing this and that and when you click submit, you will get this notice that you have to confirm. Not that its annoying but it just gives me the ‘wtf’ look on my face. It doesn’t reload the page either so your comment will still be there but I guess its just human nature to get the ‘what’ look when you submit something and it doesn’t get submitted immediately. lols.
The other side
I haven’t tried the plugin yet so I haven’t had a chance to see what’s behind it yet. However from a bloggers perspective, I can’t really see much the value of it. I mean, what makes it different from a captcha? It requires you to do a thing before submitting your comment. Is it not making it hard for your reader to do commenting? Or maybe its just being lazy to moderate comments all in all?
If you’re reading this blog for a while you know that I value comments a lot and that I make it easy for people to interact (I always ask for their take, whatnot). With that I’m thinking having this ‘confirm you’re not a spammer’ box will only give your readers a step more before they can do what they want to do. And that maybe there’s a conversion part there that gets unconverted instead.
But again that’s just my opinion. Or maybe is there something that I misunderstood with regards to the plugin? Is Akismet not enough?