Ardell and Rhonda summed things up pretty darn well… However, over the past two years, I’ve actually implemented what I’ll call “option #5″.

In this option, the first thing I started doing is moderating the first comment left by someone (as defined by their email and/or name combination). I did this mainly because I was tired of waking up in the morning to find that a new spam sites had gotten through the RCG spam filter… By simply moderating the first comment, spam comments haven’t been seen on RCG in years!

The 2nd thing I do is to offer a “carrot” to people who are willing to self-identify themselves via their Facebook profile. If someone is willing to leave a comment under their Facebook identity, then the “no follow” associated with the link on their name is stripped away so that they can get some google juice from RCG.

These two changes (i.e. option #5) seem to be working pretty darn well!

The Facebook feature that Dustin recently added prevents some anonymous commenting from taking place…we would prevent a lot of valuable dialogue if everyone was verified.

Many people prefer to be anonymous for good reason.

1) They are sometimes commenting from work and the date and time stamps will show that they were here vs. working

2) One of our commenters stayed anonymous while he was home shopping, because he didn’t want the agents to see what he was thinking while he was looking at houses. It could give them an advantage when he made an offer. As soon as he bought a house, he removed the anonymous moniker.

Many professionals want the commenters to not be anonymous, but what they want is more important because without readers…we are nothing but people talking to each other.

Look at the Seattle Real Estate Professionals Blog and most often it is just the writers talking to one another…because they require registration. They do not require that people use real names, but they do require registration, and they have less conversation generally because of that.

Dustin asked this question in December of 2006. In the two plus years since then we have gotten a lot of comments by not having restrictions.

then you start seeing crazy random things like “macielter stop googling the term “macielter” when you type macielter it lets me know that you are searching macielter. I am trying to fill the SERPs with macielter. So yeah macielter”

which doesn’t sense and makes me think it is computer generated?

As a pragmatist, I would say experiment and see what works (happens).

Two thoughts – require a valid email address (for forgotten password retrieval, if nothing else) and maybe some rules (I have some very basic ones here – http://www.realcentralva.com/the-rules/) and this one may be appropriate:

3. If you choose to write under a nom de plume, please be consistent in that use so that others can track your opinions.

I think that anonymity gives some the freedom to comment where they may not otherwise. Requesting that they do so with the same “handle” doesn’t seem too much to ask.

My two cents.

–Jim