Something I’ve been pondering over the past couple of weeks is whether I keep comments open on this site or not.
I can see the value of having comments on a blog post as it helps to clarify points, answer questions or extend the discussion, but there’s also a time factor in moderating comments and dealing with spam.
My route of thinking has also led me to think that the current way of commenting on blogs is broken. Twitter has killed the blog commenting system as its easier to comment on twitter now rather than fill out log in details and jump through hoops trying to guess what letters / numbers appear in Captcha forms.
Yes, twitter unfortunately tends to take the comments away from the blog post but on the plus side, it opens these comments up to a whole new audience (mutual followers et al) so it can then create discussions, ideas and debates which is a good thing.
The problem with this issue though is that these twitter discussions soon lose context, but crucially, are soon lost in the internet blackhole. With twitters ‘unique’ search, after a week or so, tweets soon disappear from the search records; which means you can’t track twitter discussions on your site as comments because they’ll no longer appear once they’ve been culled from twitters search db.
You could get around this by using the twitter API to search through the twitter fire-hose, pull in the relevant tweets (by hashtag or link) and store them in your own db but that seems like a hell of a lot of effort.
Disqus is another option. It’s a third party commenting system. Sign up, embed their code on your site and away you go. It allows for central user signup / logins and works across a plethora of sites… but you’re now relying on a third-party for your comments. If their service goes down, you’ve lost your comments.
I’m sure there are many more answers to this question so I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts.
Do you think comments are still relevant on blogs? Are they still needed?
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Gareth Thompson | Jan 5, 12:39 PM | Permalink
Something worth noting about Disqus (with WordPress at least) is that you can sync the comments held on disqus with wordpress’s own comments table. That way, if they were to do a “woolworths” on us, you haven’t lost the input you’ve received from your readers…
Interesting to see a few web-types thinking of turning commenting off. Let’s not stifle the web community by forcing everyone down one route (twitter).
Jamie Wright | Jan 5, 12:39 PM | Permalink
FIRST! ;)
MrQwest | Jan 5, 12:45 PM | Permalink
Heh, Jamie, ironically – you missed out by a second!
Gareth, I like that about syncing with the WordPress comment table, looks like it’s been thought about!
I actually think comments are great for discussing ideas, and learning from others. Last thing I’d want is to stifle the community.
Nearly everyone (may not be true) has a twitter account and it’s just a lot easier to post a tweet than post a comment on a blog.
David Hughes | Jan 5, 12:47 PM | Permalink
Keep comments.
This whole “I’m stopping comments” thing is another internet meme that in 12 months will be reversed.
Twitter is Twitter and is really poor for conversation.
I vote for Comments
Kris Noble | Jan 5, 12:52 PM | Permalink
I say keep comments – I think it’s valuable to have the association between the post itself and the comments.
Personally, if I just want to say “nice post” or something like that, I’ll use Twitter, whereas if I have something substantial to say I’ll comment. I think that works well as a policy.
I don’t think pulling in related tweets would actually be that hard TBH, you’d just need to set it as a nightly cron job. I bet there is a WP/TXP plugin already that would do that. If not, let’s build one!
Sam Hardacre | Jan 5, 12:58 PM | Permalink
Strangely enough, I’m actually in the process of writing about the issue of Twitter and loss of context :)
I’ve been struggling myself with adding comments to my site. My current version of EE has historically lead me into moderating hell. I’ve used Disqus on previous incarnations and functionally it does it’s job brilliantly in my opinion but as Gareth mentioned there’s a potential risk of losing that data should the service close down (the sync idea is very good – I might see if I can find something for EE). The only downside to Disqus is customisation is a bit of a pain as it generates a lot of HTML to sift through to find the style hooks you want.
Paul Adam Davis | Jan 5, 01:10 PM | Permalink
I’ve tempted to turn my blog back into a static site (made with Jekyll) and roll my own JavaScript based comment system.
Although comments are a good way of responding, I think they can be made far more useful. When I build my own comments system, it will have other ways of replying, maybe using other platforms too, but every comment made on the site will be included in the same stream as all the other stuff. All the conversation, none of the dilution.
Si Jobling | Jan 5, 01:20 PM | Permalink
I see the arguments for both sides.
Twitter is great for extending the conversation to a larger audience but then you have a problem of context (as Sam points out). In an ideal world, you should be able to present all related tweets – including an entire Twitter conversation – on the blog post itself but that would require a lot of development.
I quite liked the idea of a time window to comment but this can also be detrimental for later conversations.
I say leave comments open. The functionality is there and often starts interesting debates (look at this post for a perfect example).
Cole Henley | Jan 5, 01:33 PM | Permalink
I’m all in favour of comments on a site but afraid to say not a fan of Disqus.
I’m surprised the Happy Cog/Cognition approach to commenting hasn’t gained more traction – although doesn’t really permit moe detailed, threaded conversation.
MrQwest | Jan 5, 01:44 PM | Permalink
Wow, lots of comments! This has highlighted two thing.
1. Comments are here to stay
2. I need to implement threaded comments / replies!
@David Hughes – Completely agree. twitter is horrible for this kind of conversation but it’s not really built for it. This scenario is something that users have adapted twitter for.
@Kris Noble – Don’t start saying ‘lets build one’… I’ll hold you to that! I’ll go and investigate other Textpattern solutions though.
@Sam Hardacre – I’m looking forward to reading your post! And that’s the one thing that gets me about Disqus. I’m not a fan of the default styling and I’m not sure how far you can go before upgrading (at $299/mo) to pro to use the advanced styling editor. Otherwise though, Disqus has a lot of nice features!
@Paul Adam Davis – Do you have an ETA on this magical unicorn comments system? I want that ;)
@Si Jobling – Good shout, this post has shown that comments are a good idea and I love some of the ideas coming out of it!
@Cole Henley – I was actually going to refer to the Cognition option in the post, but kinda decided against it. From the looks of things, it’s your standard comments system which tweets for you (once you give it permission). Clever indeed and a great idea too!
Clive Walker | Jan 5, 01:58 PM | Permalink
Please keep comments. I learnt a lot by reading blog comments and I don’t agree with people who turn off comments. It’s much more valuable to have a two-way discussion but you also need to have a comments policy. For example, no “great blog man” comments unless they add something to the discussion.
Jonathan Andrew | Jan 5, 02:23 PM | Permalink
I think the popularity of the response tells us all we need to know about commenting. Despite seldom commenting myself, and not running my own blog, I find comment threads often to be as useful if not more useful than the blog post itself.
Blog posts are typically expressions of opinions, as are comments, and the more opinions I can take onboard and process, the greater my grasp of the subject becomes, and the width of my perspective is increased.
Regarding Twitter vs Comments, perhaps a way of combing the two in a single thread, by means of a unique ID being used in peoples twit responses.
Jonathan Andrew | Jan 5, 02:27 PM | Permalink
Further to my last comment. The value of comments aslo depends greatly on the nature and quality of the original post / site. If it is simply a means to start a flame war, as on YouTube etc then obviously you begin to question the validity of comment threads. But for educational, informative posts, they are invaluable. IMHO :-)
MrQwest | Jan 5, 03:15 PM | Permalink
@Clive Walker – the comments are staying! I like your idea of a policy though. All comments are moderated but I like Kris’ idea (above); any ‘nice post’ or ‘great blog’ comments, keep those on twitter. Anything more meaningful should go in a comment!
@Jonathan Andrew – Very good comments, agree whole-heartedly!
You guys are pretty amazing! Thanks for taking the time-out to leave your thoughts and comments!
Andy | Jan 5, 07:17 PM | Permalink
Spam has often left me feeling like switching off comments, but I’m not ready to declare defeat. The best anti-spam tool I’ve used is Mollom which analyses the content of the comment to decide whether it looks like spam; if it does then it offers a CAPTCHA rather than enforcing CAPTCHA on everyone. As far as I can tell no one’s made a Mollom plugin yet for Textpattern which is a shame. I’m toying with the idea of writing one, but my time is short these days.