I was recently having a conversation over an English ale with a journalist friend  about people posting comments to online newspaper articles. He was initially of the mind that only certain stories should be opened up to public comment, though I brought him round by convincing him that empowering users is the way to generate quality interactions. There are a great swath of psychological studies indicating that if you give people choice more likely to respond in a positive way.

One notable study (reference missing. anyone help me with this?) involved two groups of subjects. The first were told they must enter a room and were not for any reason allowed to leave until told. The second were asked to enter the same room, but were told that they must simply stay in the room for as long as possible. Many members of the first group became agitated after a short time in the room and demanded to be let out, wheras the subjects given a choice often stayed in the room for several hours.

For this reason if it’s a blog, a magazine or your company’s Facebook profile then why not let people have their own say. You can always ‘post-moderate” if somebody doesn’t follow the rules!

I think the same reasoning can be applied to lots of interactions users have on the Internet and this is particularly important when people are making purchases online. I know if I’m buying a USB cable online, I don’t really appreciate having to register my details. I do appreciate the option to choose and for some notable exceptions such as ASOS.com registering can be really beneficial, as you get fashion updates, trend news and even discount cards as part of ASOS’s fantastic email communication.

What are the disadvantages?

You are always going to have people who don’t quite want to tow the line, but the benefit of giving the rest of your users instant feedback/gratification easily counters this. You may even find that with a strong online community it becomes socially unacceptable to post abusive or inappropriate material.

Spam, Spam, Spam

Spam, Spam, Spam

Why a big picture of a tin or Spam? Well… it does help to take measures to prevent SPAM as I found out when I got over 3,000 comments advertising viagra on my previous blog post. Here are some common methods of SPAM prevention.

  • Human Verification (Turing Tests) – You’ve probably all seen those “Please type H76rt” sort of verifications to ensure you are a real person (CAPTCHA) but there simpler verification methods are becoming popular, like asking “What colour is the sky?”
  • Login – Making the users login before commenting
  • Blacklists – Online lists with common spam keywords, patterns and IP addresses such as Akismet.

Using a combination of the above can be effective, but again it’s important to make is as pain free for users to interact with your site.