Also, when people do try to make an account to leave a comment, it is not very obvious that you can make an account without paying. I know you guys have expenses, but it is preventing people from leaving helpful comments for me.

I suppose we could bold the text that plainly explains people can just click the Register button. But that still assumes people actually read things... probably the better option would just be to include another option called "FREE" and have that selected by default.

Mike will have to look into that, as well as the Guest commenting. I think all Guest accounts are simply disabled across the site. We stopped using Guest accounts several years ago for various reasons. If they can be re-enabled just for the Journals, that might be alright.

If they can be re-enabled just for the Journals, that might be alright.

The guest comments were disabled because of spammers. Right now we don't have an effective spam prevention measure that would allow us to combat blog spam.

Well, in this particular case, journal authors have the ability to enable guest comments per-journal. So if they do so then we should notify them to expect spam and let them deal with it (via the setting to moderate guest comments). If it really bothers them they can disable it again. We should make it clear that we won't be able to provide a means to combat the spam.

The main problem with this idea, unfortunately, is that guest commenting appears to be enabled for all journals by default when they are created :/ Unless Mike you have an easy way to flip that flag on all the journals...

Maybe you could enforce guest comments to be moderated by the journal author?

Same problem, all journals have moderation turned off by default

How much spam are we talking here?

To elaborate a bit more on what frob said, keep in mind the IPS software is a well-used suite of tools that spambots are very good at targeting. So yea, a good deal of spam would ensue