Anonymous commenting turned temporarily off

I don't know whether it is an effect of the holiday season or what, but in the last weeks the amount of anonymous comment spam has exploded. For example one identical comment spam mail was posted 46 times this week on different blog posts. Comment spam increases my blog administration workload considerably. In addition Blogger seems to have a technical problem with comment moderation at the moment, so that when I decide to publish or reject a comment, half of the time the comment is still in the list of comments to moderate, and I have to repeat the moderation several times before it goes away.

As I am quite busy with other things, I therefore decided to temporarily turn off anonymous commenting, probably until the end of the year. That should put a stop to much of the comment spam. This means that in the coming weeks you will need either a Google account or an OpenID to post a comment on my blog. As getting such an ID is free, and still largely anonymous, I think that this is not too much of a restriction.