I've been dithering and thinking about the whole subject of comments
to blog posts for a while.
At first I viewed my blog here as a forum containing a special kind of
thread, one in which I, as a kind of lesser god, am the only person able to
start a new one. But it's not really a thread as I understand from
newsgroups and forums: there's no hierarchical or tree-like view to
the comments — this comment is a reply to that comment, but this
other comment is a reply to the original post — all comments are
merely replies to the original post, and it can be hard to reconstruct
the conversation that the post engendered. This annoys the heck out of
me and I wonder if any blog engine actually does do threaded
commenting.
Another issue I battle with is whether I should insist on commenters
being "known" to the system. At present, commenters can be anonymous,
at least in the sense that they can choose a random nom de blog. Don't
get me wrong, I'm perfectly willing to be berated by a customer with a
legitimate beef and so I like reading all the comments. But what gets
me are the anonymous comments that say something along the lines of
"Your product sucks, it's too slow/buggy/badly written/idiotically
designed, my grandmother wrote a better one during her Thursday game
of bingo." There's no way I can help a commenter like that —
there's no way to trace him and to let loose the dogs of support to
solve the issue — and of course the commenter knows full well I
can't and that I know they know I can't. So the only conclusion I can
make is that the commenter is a troll. And so I act as censor and
delete those comments, because they don't advance the conversation,
such as it is, but I still don't like doing so.
Which reminds me: I'm not a fan of the "great post!" school of
commenting. I'd much rather your comments raised other points,
discussed issues, analyzed the content, provided a supporting
link, made a joke, anything other than be a "me too" comment. Don't
get me wrong, I like praise as much as the next man, preen, preen, but
I'd much prefer some good discussion. W Somerset Maugham once said
"People ask for criticism, but they only want praise", but I'm paid
to receive the former. I haven't deleted any "great
post!" comments yet, but beware...
And then there's the issue of should I reply to comments addressed to
me? Or should I write a new blog post altogether to answer the point
made by a commenter? To see any replies I may have made, you have to
navigate to the page of the original post and then scroll down and
scan looking for my image. (I suppose in a way this is another facet
of the "comment navigation" issue like the one above.) I tend to use
my inner Editor to determine if the answer I shall give is important
enough for another post, for an update to the post I'm replying to, or
for a simple comment. So far I think I'm getting it right, but that's
only because no one has complained to me that I'm getting it wrong
(and now I await a slew of comments about how I have done so).
Another issue to which I have no clear answer: should I close down old
blog posts for commenting —freezing the content and comments of
the post? Or not? For example, people still comment on my blog posts
on right-to-left language support. Should I freeze those posts so that
they can't? To be honest, the fact that people still do comment means
that it's forever in my mind, and so is more likely that I'll build it
into a roadmap.
So what do you think? Tell you what, leave me a comment here to let me
know...
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