Comments on this blog
I wrote this post a while back. The content can still be relevant but the information I've linked to may not be available.
I try and operate a sensible comments moderation policy on this blog but I see a lot of blogs that do not do this and that have a free-for-all comments policy (it seems). I think that approach devalues comments especially on high traffic/high visibility sites. If I was in charge of those sites, I would have tougher moderation on comments. Here's what I do here.
- Comments that don't add value don't get published. This means that comments that simply say “Nice blog, I appreciate your posts" will not get published. Whilst it may be nice to hear these sentiments about your blog, I'm never sure how genuine they are since many such comments are seemingly made just for the sake of getting a commenter's website linked (even though the links have
rel = "nofollow"). - Comments that do not provide the commenter's real name don't get published. Any comments from “web design los angeles" or similar won't see the light of day. This is some misguided attempt to get search engine credit via link keywords (it's misguided because of
rel = "nofollow") but if you cannot put your real name on a comment, well…. - Comments should say something about the blog post, not just your personal site that you want to promote.
This is a perfectly sensible policy I think. Please add your own thoughts in the comments!
Comments
28 Jun 2011 08:52:35
I removed comments from my blog for many of the reasons you’ve stated. Since doing so I get extremely high quality comments via email and I choose to update posts that way. I regret losing the ability to discuss a post but I wouldn’t go back – most comments were low value or spammy.
I’m likely to move to open sourcing my blog entirely and hosting it on Github – I’m hoping people will fork and add to articles that way. This also allows me to continue to curate it.
28 Jun 2011 15:16:03
@George: That’s an interesting approach to use Github. Would be interested to hear how that works.
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