Why I Require Email When Posting Comments On My Blog

2 reasons, one of them is not necessary, and is merely for commenter bling, the other helps me by eliminating 99.999 percent of spam comments.

Avatar

Wikipedia describes an avatar as ...a computer user's representation of himself or herself.... Here's my avatar, those who know me will see the obvious resemblance(note the glistening pecs):

When I post comment on a site that knows how to grab an avatar by email, my avatar appears next to my comment. 

Email Spam

Comment spam sucks.  When I was using just a CAPTCHA image, i was getting thousands of spam comments a day, totally sucked.  Except for a few randoms, and by "a few" i'm talking like less than 20, akismet has filtered all of the spam.  It's free for personal use like this blog, all you have to do is sign up for a wordpress blog. Once you get that set up you get a api key sent to you and you're set to go.  Go where? Exactly.  I used the Akismet Api from codeplex to use the akismet service, super simple.  Right before a comment gets to me it's filtered through akismet, if it gets a thumbs down from akismet as being legitimate, the comment is ignored and not passed on to me for moderation.