If you want people to comment, say on a lifehacker post about going paperless, and you require sign-ins for commenting, don’t trash their comments when they forget a password.

Among the least interesting passwords I remember is my lifehacker account for commenting. I don’t use it every day and it’s of zero value to a hacker (hence, a mediocre password such as “password”) to masquerade as me on lifehacker.

Today I wrote a brief comment on the post regarding scanning/ocr/storage workflow, contributing to the community in some small way. Lifehacker wants me to sign in. Of course, I forgot my password (since it’s for some reason forbidden for Firefox to remember it for me). In the course of doing the reset, the site not-so-conveniently trashed my comment. Gone. Zero. 

I don’t care enough to write it twice if you can’t care enough to remember it once. If I write it again, it’ll go on my blog as part of my workflow series.