Happy Easter!

I believe that there are two reasons you are not getting many posts: you have to make an account to post, which itself turns off most people since that's another username and password they have to remember, and lack of desire by participants to discuss issues like this on a news site.

Personally, I think that the first reason is rather lazy, but the latter is quite logical. When I read this site, I usually only want the news and nothing else. I never seek user comments. I've found that comments on news posts (such as can be found at slashdot.org) range from interesting to senseless, but even the most interesting are usually trivial points of fact or attempts to blurt out as much jargon as one can in a single sentence. Unfortunately, the majority of comments end up being senseless and so overly emotionally charged that there is no point in continuing the discussion. When there is something to discuss, people immediately seek the instant gratification of espousing their unscientific feelings on the issue and then engage in ever growing flame wars until only those who enjoy arguing for the sake of arguing are left. I see this process as a waste of my time, and I believe that many others do as well, which is why I stay away from it entirely.

This is not to say that I do not support discussion systems that are not moderated by 'peers', but I have found the forum format of commenting to not work well in general, and on news sites in particular. There is too much of an impulse to simply respond to the title or the individual article with no prior knowledge of the issue at hand.

If you could develop a large, intelligent community despite what I have said, you would be my hero. Whatever ends up happening, I will continue to use this page as a great news source on biology. It takes allot longer than a year for most websites to gain momentum, so please keep up the work and I assure you that you will see results.

One suggestion: try your best to obtain the biologynews.com domain name. .Net's tend to bring in allot less traffic.

Thanks for the great input; I kinda suspected that the reasons you cited were the cause of the lack of comments (I had `retry anonymous posting` in my todo list).

The reason why I impletemented strict control to the comments (registered users only) was, you guessed it, tons of spam. And of the worst kind. I have a PhD to finish and I can't monitor the site 24/24, nor spend an hour deleting spam at the end of each day.

This being said, I'll try to implement a bayesian filter on the comments and see if we get good results with that. Today I stumbled on Akismet, a centralized bayesian filter specially designed to counter spam on blogs and news sites. They have an open API; I just need the time to hack it in phpBB (if someone else doesn`t before me).

Building an "intelligent community" is what I hope - the most popular biology related forum (Biology-Online) is overrun by people with very little or no biology experience / scientific background / good logic. However, I'm not sure its possible (and I'm not losing sleep over it!); time will tell.

I was hoping that biologynews.com would not get renewed this year, but sadly it has (for another year, at least). I`ll try to contact the owner and see what his price would be - we never know.

And don't worry, I won't drop support for this website anytime soon Just focusing my efforts on a bigger project.

There we go. I just implemented registration-free posting. I also implemented a bayesian filter on top of it, so if your comment doesn't show, don't worry; if it's not spam, I'll approve it soon enough and it will show up.

Hopefully it will help build up the community around here

Oh if you spot bugs, let me know. I finished it kind of late last night, so it might not be perfect yet.

Im glad to hear we have some anti-spam mechansims in place. But I have to ask how a spam-filter would work. aside from excluding unregistered users. Am I to assume that it applies some kind of artificial intelligence to the answers? That would seem a bit to sophisticated for a forum.

I implemented the Akismet spam filter in phpBB. Basically, it sends messages and ips to a centralized database, analyse them using different algorithms / AI, and report back in real time (spam or not spam). It's very effective, catching 99% of spam (that only I see) and allowing unregistered users to post at the same time.

Thanks for the info. I can't say though that I'm any clearer on how it actually discriminates between the 99% spam and the rest. I suppose this a technical question one doesn't need to enjoy the prewritten benefits of Askimet, but still... Thanks