Newsvine.com has a good twist by adding the “thread” model to its comments (replies can be threaded, with the initial comment as a parent). However, it is a community site, and you can’t comment unless you’re part of the community.

For anyone who is really *interested* in the conversation related to a specific post, there needs to be an easy way to know if someone else has commented that is more granular than “subscribe to this blog’s comment feed.”

My name is Kellie Parker, and I am the Online Community Manager for PC World and Macworld. I’d like to talk further about the points raised here, and provide some response & background as to why we are doing some of the things that we are.

First, I want to say that we know that there is room for improvement in our registration systems and identity practices. Some of the points that you raise are valid, and have really helped get the conversation flowing here about things like Open ID and ways that we can make registration and identity easier for the user without causing an undue burden on ourselves. I also agree that our writers and editors (and to some extent, the non-editorial staff) can do a better job (in some cases, a MUCH better job) at interacting with and engaging with our readers and commenters.

I also agree that many of the registration processes out there are confusing and long. As a user, when I’m faced with a page full of blanks asking for very personal information and the minimums aren’t clearly articulated, I very well may give up and decide not to register. I’ve worked with our marketing, design, and engineering teams internally to make our forms (http://www.pcworld.com/register and http://www.macworld.com/register) easy to understand, and ask for a minimum of information. We’d love for everyone to fill out the optional information, as it does help us with lead generation and other marketing promotions, but we don’t require it or bother the user for it again later.

We comply vigorously with CAN-SPAM laws, and we see those as the minimum we should do, not the maximum. It’s easy to think of us all sitting in our conference room rubbing our grubby little hands together and thinking of more ways to screw our readers. That’s simply not the case. We think and talk a lot about the reader experience, the perception of spam vs. actual spam, and we do our best to make the best experiences for our readers. Yes, we sometimes have to do stuff that some of them might not love. We do our best to run our business and protect those interests with the minimum of impact on the reader. We are not perfect. But we try really hard.

To address the question of why we require registration. First, it’s important to understand my goals as a community manager. I am not simply trying to get the most comments on an article or blog entry. I’m trying to build a community. Community is ultimately about relationships with other people. If all I were interested in were number of comments, of course I would open the floodgates and let everyone post anything they wanted. That’s easy to do. Community building is hard work and it takes a lot of time. It requires different stuff.

A reader is only required to register in order to put text on our website. Occasionally, we require registration for participation in other initiatives, such as our current Dream PC contest. But that’s more the exception than the rule. We have interactive features on the site (such as polls, surveys, and article recommendation voting) that do not require registration at all. It is only when the reader puts text (article comments, product reviews, forum posts) on our site that they are required to register and/or sign in.

There are three reasons that I have this policy: identity, quality, and moderation.

In the real world, you identify people by their physical characteristics. You look at their hair, their face, their body, and their voice. Online, you do the same thing, only the identifying characteristics are username, avatar, signature, and profile. Without these things, people are not consistently identified, and relationships cannot form. I want people to register so that I and other readers can recognize them when they post, and we can form attachments and relationships to them. It is these attachments that create a strong community and ultimately keep people coming back. Some people, maybe even most people, will use the same username. But some won’t, and it is those people that are disruptive and are harmful to community formation.

When users are allowed to post anonymously (and I would argue that being able to select a new name for each post is the same thing as posting anonymously) they are generally not as… polite. Personal attacks, spam, profanity, etc all go up dramatically when users post in an anonymous space. For a long time, we didn’t require registration on our PC World blogs. It was like Lord of the Flies in there. We had a lot of comments, but the quality of the conversation was very poor. Of course I would love to have a high volume of quality comments, but if I have to choose between the two, I will choose quality. I am trying to build a space for people to have intelligent conversations and to help each other. Allowing personal attacks and everything else that often comes with anonymous postings tends to kill this conversation and make the serious folks go elsewhere.

Finally, moderation. Due to the increase in posts we’d receive as well as the increased percentage of posts that require moderator action, it would take my moderation team at least twice as long as it currently does to deal with posts. Especially when I have no information on the user, all I can do is delete your post, and wait for you to post it again. Rinse/Repeat. My hands are tied when it comes to quickly and efficiently weeding out trolls and spammers, and preventing them from posting in the future. I’d rather we spend our time building a quality community. That’s not to say that we don’t have any trolls or spammers now… we do. It’s just that they are fewer than they would be without registration, and they cause a minimum of disruption because of the information on them that I have (and the action I can take because of it).

Many of the most successful blogs require registration too. Some even go further than that. For example, all of the Gawker blogs require commenters to “try out” first. They require you to register, then to make a couple comments. If they like what you write, you are approved to comment. If they stop liking what you write, you are “executed”, usually publicly in a blog entry. So it’s not entirely the blogs vs media battle when it comes to registrations.

Thank you for a thought provoking blog entry, and thank you for inviting me to comment here and explain our policies and my thought processes. I welcome further discussion on the issue.

We’ve talked through some ideas, and want to make it as simple as possible. And we want to make it clear that the authentication process is just to give them access to our community stuff, not to add them to our mailing lists.

I like the OpenID idea–that’s a good one, Joe Cascio!

How is that not so obviously interfering with the user from having a good user experience? What were they thinking building that?

They (ZDNet) are demanding data about me that they don’t need and don’t deserve. It’s all good. They have declared themselves irrelevant. Thanks for playing, ZDNet, here’s your party favor.

Wait. Didn’t Ziff Davis own PC Magazine at one time? Whatever happened to that magazine? Same brainiac executives still in charge there?

@philiphodgen

Perhaps we should just walk out on them and take our business elsewhere . . .

Is it that easy? Do you think they’ll get it? NO!!! Not without a united effort by the people formerly known as the audience . . . we touched on the need for new strategies in our post on marketing in The Relationship Economy. Remember the peanuts that brought Jericho back? Well, that campaign worked (though not for very long), but this one is different, and it won’t cost you money.

How ’bout this?

. . . go to as many company feedback sites as you can in the next 7 days.

Post something like this.

I (and a lot of people like me) have been trying to convey our sincere desire to have a real relationship with those who provide products and services for our consumption and enjoyment. The benefit of this relationship for you is that you get to know EXACTLY what we need, not only what you think we need, based on your research, focus groups, and late-night brainstorming with people who are so entrenched in the marketing model of the 20th Century that they wouldn’t know a real conversation if one bit them on the nose. We want you to know what we need, when we need it, and why . . .

If you really care about our relationship, please invest two minutes and three seconds in it, by watching this video - http://bringtheloveback.com/2007/05/16/mdas_europe/