Ma.gnolia, my favorite social bookmarking service, recently switched from merely supporting OpenID to actually restricting all new user signups to use the authentication platform. This received a lot of attention – most good – while Matt Mullenweg (and others I’m sure) chimed in to say that this method shouldn’t be viewed as a good strategy to cut spam.
Larry Halff, founder of Ma.gnolia, chimed in today via the site’s official blog to give some background on the discussion, statistics that made the reasoning come up in the first place, and why they believe that while it isn’t a strategy to cut down on spam, it has, indeed, cut down on spam.
So now you know the rest of the story.
