Disabling Comments, The Pros
I said I would write about this, in a recent post, and without any further ado - I give you the Pros for disabling comments on your blog. Blasphemy! you might say. Not really, there are some proven advantages, outstanding examples, and well thought-of bloggers to backup this, “theory”.
First, let’s examine the purpose behind enabling comments on a blog post. Quite simply, the purpose is to allow immediate feedback from your readers based on the topic, your opinion, the post at hand - which can be very fulfilling. That is, if you have a strong reader base that feel compelled to comment. This is almost the sole reason for the growing popularity of weblogs today.
After giving this subject some thought, I figured I would round up some of the most popular blogs (that I know of) which do not enable comments, yet still receive a pretty good amount of feedback.
- decaffeinated.org
- The Daily Report
- Thoughts From Eric - Comments available on ocassion
- Adactio
- Daring Fireball
- Kottke.org UNDESIGN
- Textism
The above list of blogs which disable comments, and/or only use them once and awhile, is comprised from my list of blogs. I am sure that there are many others, and if you’d like to - let me know about them.
Now that we know why one might enable comments, let’s see why someone wouldn’t enable them. What do these guys know that we don’t? What are we missing? From what I can tell, it’s purely a strategy to acquire links to their blog.
Think about it this way, on TUG.n we have comments enabled. When our readers decide that they would like to comment on a post, they can. However, for those that decide to disable comments, an added step would need to be taken on behalf of the reader in order to comment. They would actually have to post about it on their own blogs. Genius. This not only creates countless amounts of links back to their Blogs from various other blogs, but it also puts to use the Trackback feature, which if used correctly, can really help the blog in search engine results. John Gruber has mentioned many times that he blogs things purely for the sake of making sure the information is “out there” and that people can “Google it”.
I’m not saying that the above reason is the only reason that these guys disable commenting, but it sure seems like a good one. Some of them have cited that they hate dealing with comment SPAM, or off-topic comments, and that may very well be. But I definitely see the advantages to almost forcing readers to comment via their own blogs.
So, you now have a decision to make. To enable or disable, that is the question.
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