Phil Ringnalda has an interesting post about comments, moderation and spam. As someone who developed my own blog software (part of the interest in running a blog, as far as I’m concerned is in testing out my development chops), I thought long and hard about how to approach comments and avoid spam. My solution was more restrictive than most but works for me. Gated Community The reason I decided to first ask people to register before being able to comment was based on the observation of several online communities. Metafilter, Slashdot and Kuro5hin all opted for solutions that required registration first. Granted, requiring that people register requires some extra work and slows down the amount of people commenting but it’s based on the concept that most people that read a particular site are returning visitors. A look at my server logs shows that this may largely be the case: Generally, I get traffic from roughly the same ratio of sites to visitor. There must be a golden mean in here somewhere as to how this works. From there, I took one extra step, which is to require that people verify their email. TNL.net users are all verified based on an…