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Last week I've talked about some cold facts about commenting where some people go through a great deal of trouble to get their readers to comment, and how I wanted to change my attitude toward commenting, but I find it that sometimes a lot of sites just make commenting harder than it needs to be.

Just ask yourself these questions and let me know how many times you've gotten mad about these commenting stumbling blocks:

1. You've entered your comment only to find out that it needs moderation, and if you enter it Saturday and you are from Europe, it might take until Monday afternoon-evening until your comment gets approved.

2. You write all of those informations like name, email and web address only to find out that the site only displays your name (more about my opinion on this in a minute).

3. You can't edit or delete your comment, when you've made a spelling error or worse a logic error.

4. You can't preview your comment, which is especially useful to see how that long phrase of your is being formatted by the commenting style.

5. You're not being told what styling tags you can use, whether you have some markdown tags, or a couple of html tags, or if you can post links in the comment or not.

Make your site a community hub and comments will follow

I love the way sites like nettuts, smashing magazine, webdesignerdepot, line25, designinformer can offer great quality articles for free and still make a living, and although they all are running a business, I believe that they like the situation where they are at, where they can offer knowledge to the masses and still make a buck out of it.

Out of these sites, smashing magazine is the only site that will not display a website link to the name of the comment, because they don't ask for it and although I think this is a mistake at least it is not like friedbeef which asks for the website link and yet they don't link that website to your name.

I believe this is a big mistake because:

1. When I read a good comment, and they have a great looking gravatar, I can't wait to check out what else they might have to offer, and it's a great way to check it out by just clicking the linking name.

2. A good commenter will stand out from the crowd and it would be in your best interest as a reader to discover new fountains of knowledge that other people would be willing to share for free with you.

3. It brings the community together in my opinion, and big sites should not be afraid to endorse this kind of interaction because even thou I discovered 40 best practices that have great content and that I would like to check out, I still check out daily only the major sites because of the community interaction and the high quality content.

4. It differentiates the nicknames or names from one another and that can happen to my great surprise, like Jeff Hardy the wrestler and Jeff Hardy the .Net guy.

Commenting elements I like to see

I love to see the following elements present in a blog:

1. Have the web address as a link to the name, it's a great way to see what that person that is commenting is doing.

2. Have a preview button and an edit button, sometimes I might misspell or I have written some words on an anger that I might want to rephrase in order to better get the message that I want to convey out there without the crazy ranting or aggressive attitude.

3. Have a system like commentluv implemented because it is a great idea to have the name of the last post displayed next to your name (I plan to implement such a system in django-mingus, hope to figure it out by the time I will roll the redesign). I mean just think about it ... If someone posts a thank you for a great article and his last post is about getting cheap viagra or buy my quick scheme to get rich, at least you know not to thank him back because you would know that he is just a spammer.

4. Implement threaded comments, it's just a nicer organized way of viewing comments where you can visually skip an entire conversation and focus on just what's interesting to you.

Make a stand to improve your commenting system and profit from it

Commenting it's here to stay, some will use the tools at hand more effectively and get more engagement out of their users, and other will continue to frustrate their users and will effectively drive out the comments away in a form or a fashion.

What about you?

Will you take the best practice and implement them in your blog?

Or will you just leave you're commenting system in a way that just brings frustration to your readers?