Blog Commenting-On or Off?
In Blogging | 2 comments | permalink
What’s your take on allowing comments on your blog? Seems like a no brainer right? Well, there seem to be some differing opinions out there about the benefit of allowing comments.
John Chow writes of the importance of commenting on other blogs (especially the big ones) in order to help bring traffic back to your site. Naturally, he practices what he preaches by employing the top commentators plugin on his site.
Meanwhile, Steve Pavlina explains he was spending more time monitoring comments than he wanted to and decided to turn them off. Although he turned off the comments he left trackbacks enabled. He saw no drop off in traffic and actually, wished he canceled comments sooner.
My take? While Steve has done a great job of building traffic according to his statistics, I have to agree with John on this one. Perhaps, enabling comments is a function of the size of your site in which case I certainly want to leave comments enabled to encourage the activity of my users.
In addition to providing the author with feedback, comments also give readers a voice. By allowing them interact with the author and one another, not only is activity increased but so is the users commitment to the community.
What do you think? How ’bout leaving a comment?
Tags: Wordpress, blogging, comments, feedback, community
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Sphere It
I think the ideal solution is to keep comments turned off and provide a full discussion forum instead. Every new blog post gets its own thread in the forums. This eliminates comment spam completely, and forums are much better for community building in the long run. Plus the community is always free to discuss topics in other categories that I’m not actively blogging about, so you get many-to-many communication instead of just one-to-many.
To date there have been about 50,000 posts in the forums since Nov 2006, so I think it’s quite an effective solution.
Hmmm… we’re finally making good progress on really getting good comments and conversation going on many of our posts so I’m not looking to turn that off just yet.
I first came across Steve Pavlina’s site some months ago - and damn, I read SOOOO much of his excellent and thought-provoking stuff. Love the “10 reasons you should never get a job” and lots of others. Even Jennifer who is WAY less likely to get distracted spent hours and hours on some on his site.
Anyway, I noticed at one point the comments got turned off and instead there was a link to the forums and I remember wondering what impact that had to the community around the site. I guess now we know, glad to hear it’s worked out well.
We’re planning to try out forums ourselves, but my initial thoughts are that you’d have to do WAY more policing of content on the forums than you do on your blog comments. This particularly applies to contraversial topics such as many of our articles. I don’t mean approving every comment, but especially on controversial issues some people are quick to get very unpleasant with others, and there it begins.
Here are examples of some of our more controversial articles, so you get the idea of where I’m coming from:
- “Honesty About Previous Sex Partners… How Much Do You Really Need To Share?”,
- “Break Up and Divorce - Should You Condemn Yourself to a Bad Relationship for Life Because of Religion and Guilt?”, and so on.
You get the idea.
I know ProBlogger Darren Rowse and some others have expressed similar concerns with their forums…
We’ve been rather fortunate to have most of our commentators be pretty well behaved. It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out in a forum environment.
So I’m looking forward to trying it - ONCE we have an active enough commenter community to really properly seed the forums with enough initial content.
Have an awesome day!
Dan