Hi friends! So a while back I was told people who wanted to comment… could not. This made me sad. Incredibly sad. So sad that I went to the WordPress forums and tried to ask about it. I got yelled at. A lot. That was not incredibly fun. It was basically agreed to be a glitch that WordPress needs to fix…
And/but here’s this update (which addresses specifically the need to be logged in to comment):
There is quite a bit of speculation here, and while I can’t address every single point, I’d like to point out that one of the many reasons behind this change was to provide greater control over your own identity within comments at WordPress.com.
Anyone who knows your email address could have easily linked their comment to your account in a way that was indistinguishable from you leaving it, and you would have no way of knowing it or stopping them. Now comments linked to your account are always going to be from you.
Here are a few more points to keep in mind, which should address the majority of your concerns:
1. To control what shows when you comment, you can edit your profile at Users -> My Profile in your Dashboard.
2. Folks can still comment just like before, but if they use a registered email address, they need to log in to prove that it’s really them.
3. This extends to both Gravatar and WordPress.com accounts, which actually are the same thing, the same user names and passwords. Folks who are sure that they do not have a WordPress.com account may have forgotten that they registered a Gravatar account years earlier.
4. If folks are still unsure, they can use the Forgot Password links at either http://wordpress.com/ or http://en.gravatar.com/ to regain access to their account.
5. Just as before, you don’t have to require your commenters to use an email address, it’s an option under Settings -> Discussion.
6. We’re happy to help people who are having trouble commenting, logging in, or resetting their passwords. Let us know steps to reproduce the problem and we’ll do our best to help the person or fix the bug.
You can see the thread here. That response is from a “happiness engineer” – I’ve yet to decide if that’s ironic or not. I also don’t know if people who were having issues do have WordPress, or gravatar, and/or if they were trying to use the email address linked to that.
Upon reflection, those people aren’t very good at communicating their issues. ;P But anyway, I hope that helps.
And if it’s something else… well, my foray into the WordPress forums wasn’t very successful. But we can hope the glitch, or whatever, is resolved soon. If you are one of those people though, I really hope you’ll try to work around it, and tell me what did or didn’t allow you to successfully comment.
I obviously want as many people to comment as possible, and especially for giveaways, etc, you know? You wanna win stuff! 😀