Graham Attwell has reported that the requirement to join the site before discussing his Wales-Wide Web entries has deterred several people from commenting in his weblog, and led to email exchanges instead.

We've always known that more conventional 'blog-like' comments would be desirable in knotes blogs when used as personal publishing systems, and had made plans to implement lightweight, non-members comments in January 2005. I thought it worth explaining why we decided to implement the heavy-weight 'real' members' discussions as the default: the added-value of knotes, as compared with Blogger, say, is that is can embed in specifically collaborative environments, and can be adapted to specific collaboration goals. For those purposes, 'real' discussion - integrated with portal members' discussions in general, or in other collaboration contexts, is a must.

We do, however, recognise that there are other purposes for which knotes blogs can be extremely useful - purposes for which ad-hoc comments from non-members are a necessary feature. (And note that, in the interim, a non-knotes weblog (from TypePad etc) can still integrate fairly well with knotes-powered Plone sites and discussions, because knotes makes all Plone content and knotes discussions trackback aware).

We've considered several options, including running parallel, hidden Plone sites to encapsulate membership for weblog comments outwith the site-membership roster, but think that we'll begin with a crude, all-SQL solution which just implements the usual email-address+name+comment convention, completely outside any portal_membership information. We'll of course want to have some means of 'promoting' such lightweight comments into real discussion threads at some later point.

Of course, allowing non-member comments opens the possibility of comment-spam problems. We'd appreciate any advice on dealing with that one, though we're pretty sure that we can effect filtering such as Stephen's Web uses to minimise this risk.

Expect to see lightweight comments a few weeks after we release a public beta of knotes. Please email us if you have anything to add on this issue before then, or trackback to this entry with your thoughts.