30 May 08
A Brief Comment on Comments WilcosWorld
I've been mulling over whole topic of having comments enabled on my site for a while, and I've decided to turn them off. This isn't because of anyone who has commented wrote something I got upset by, I have met some supremely nice people as a response to comments left on my posts.
Then again, I have received comments from insufferably unpleasant individuals, which I chose to keep on the site out of openness and honesty, and tried to answer with a reasonable comment, but I did somewhat wonder the point of leaving responses to a discourteous fly-by-night.
However, the main reason I have decided to disable comments is that I was getting inundated with trackback and comment spam. Having to patently go through each automated spam comment simply to check that no false positives had fallen through, is hardly the best impetus to then write something creative.
Reader-to-Author Feedback
So the alternative is to encourage email. I agree with Austin Heller, an email forces you to think about your response for longer, and in doing so you get your point of view across in a more constructive way:
"...e-mail is a completely different paradigm for reader-to-author feedback than commenting. When you sit down at your e-mail, be it a web or desktop client, you're sort of pushed into the mood to think harder about what you want to say to the recipient. You're not dealing with some skimpy comment form- you're sending a letter like you'd send to any of your contacts, so you want to make sure it looks good and reads well. You have the freedom to come back and keep working on it later." Austin Heller
So now that I am Habari powered, I thought ‘what the hell’ lets go for something completely different. On the advice of Andy C, (a man with a mystery last name), I’ve been experimenting with Disqus. Disqus allows users to make an account to manage their commenting and even create a forum of their own. The real draw of Disqus is the ability for users to easily utilize the Disqus commenting system on their own blog or other such website. I might continue to use Disqus on certain posts, but I would really rather have the far more productive and rewarding private one-to-one conversations that email offers.
Once the Habari RSS feed bug is fixed, I’ll be added a short note at the bottom of each post that previously had posts containing a summery of previous comments. Hopefully the choice of sending an email of a twitter message will not put off someone who would otherwise have commented.