I said the other day that I’ve been wanting to comment on the comments, and today seems like a good time to do it. I’m leaving for a weekend retreat in fifteen minutes, forcing me to be brief and ensuring that I’m not around to further comment on the comments.
Comments are an awesome way to add interaction. Suddenly I’m not just talking to myself. Yeah, there’s always e-mail, but over the years very few people have e-mailed me in response to my thoughts. It happens, but pretty rarely. Comments are immediate, easy, and public. Not only can someone tell me what they think, they can tell everyone else reading my thoughts what they think.
All of that is very cool. But it’s also scary. Suddenly this isn’t just me spouting off about what I think. You can respond, and I’m not sure if I’m ready for that. Faulty logic can be burned, impassioned posts can be slammed. If I haven’t fully discovered my position, I still have to be ready to defend it in the comments.
While the comments do add immediate interaction, sometimes that interaction can be scary. It will make me think twice about what I post. I can always reserve the right to ignore the comments, and I may just do that.
I also have to decide if I’m going to participate in the comments. I see some blogs where the author writes as much in the comments as he does in the blog. While that’s certainly the interaction of community, I don’t know if I’m ready for that. Sometimes I want to say my bit and leave it at that.
So I’m still getting used to comments. For four and a half years I wrote with minimal feedback and interaction — and I can tell you it was surprising enough when someone would respond to my thoughts in person or on the phone. I’ll need some time to get used to the instant feedback.
So now I’m going to comment on the comments… IN the comments? Is that right?
You’ve noticed that, on any particular post, you can close the comments after they’ve been open, or simply not open them at all, right? So technically, although it may seem like cheating, if you’re not ready to have people instantly respond, you could just tell the system to have no comments and that solves that.
Except for that pesky phone and email. So then, to get rid of your phone and email, you could…
If I write about something and I don’t want people to comment, I just shut off the comments for that entry. Then, Hah!, people can’t post response arguments to my underdeveloped ideas!
What about the people who comment in another section about the entry you don’t want them to comment on, possibly even commenting on the fact that you clearly don’t want them commenting on the entry you are in fact commenting on?
Well, I can’t answer the question Jeremy raised, but I do have another helpful link.
One think comments open you up to is something known as “comment spam.” I keep extremely tight watch over the comments on my site, and if one comes in that is advertising for Viagra (I’ve gotten four or five of those already) I usually delete it within five minutes, so you guys never see them.
I just found something called MT-Blacklist, though, that might prove to help curb that kind of stuff semi-automatically. Here’s the link so you can read up:
http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist/
CHEAP VIAGRA!
http://www.eachday.net/memories/knightopia/
Well, it was cheap, but it didn’t work!
It all depends on how you want your blog to work. While mine is often just me randomly spouting off about stuff, I often write a blog with the intention to have it spread into the discussion area, hence my frustration with people that won’t comment in mine. To each his own, so try it out for awhile, and if you don’t like it, stop doing it.