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No Comment-Function? Screw You, Then
Posted by isecore on October 26th, 2007
One of the most annoying things with many blogs is that the owner has disabled the commenting function. There is no way to input any response to what the author has written, whether it is to criticize the author or provide additional facts. Admittedly, the dark side of commenting is inviting trolls or spam, but there’s always a way to protect oneself against such annoyances. The best defense against trolls is growing a thick skin, and spammers can be thwarted with basic filtering.
I’ve surfed around a bit, and found several blogs where the author doesn’t want comments. In some cases I can respect that, but in most cases it’s just the author putting himself on a high horse rather than interacting with his readers. I quickly grow tired of these sites, regardless of their eventual qualities.
Whenever I see a blog with a disabled or missing comment-function I see a poser. A wannabe. Someone who wants to be trendy and blogging, but doesn’t actually want to participate in a community. The person simply wants to preach his/her opinion rather than evolving through interaction. It’s just like people who bike around on fixed-gear bikes and carry messenger bags despite never having worked as a bike-messenger. They’re posers trying to act a part but without the culture and experience.
So, are you a poser? A wannabe? Someone who wants the trendy confirmation, someone who wants to be able to say “yeah, I’m a blogger” whenever you talk with strangers? Then stop killing the comments. Embrace the interaction. If not, you’re just another poser.
EDIT: It should be clarified that the reason I went off on this rant was that before I started writing it I encountered a long string of blogs while surfing the web. Blogs that in my opinion didn’t merit to be called blogs, rather they were glorified old-style homepages. Several of these were full of preachy language (unlike myself, of course!) and stuffed to the brim with factual errors. This frustrated me since I wanted to comment that the facts they based their writings on were severely flawed, yet my voice had been strangled.
This grew even worse when I contemplated the multitude of celebrity-bloggers (i.e. celebrities who for whatever reason wants to add blogger to their list of “merits”) who run some mediafunded “blog” yet lacks every function that I think makes a blog - no comments, no permalinks, no easy way of finding entries, no pingbacks or trackbacks.
I apologize since I managed to miss this, and instead sounded like a rabid maniac.
License
This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 Sweden License.
October 27th, 2007 at 13:04
I disable comments when the post is 21 days old, and after that comments need to be sent through e-mail. The original reason for this was that I got massive amounts of spam on old posts, but today Akismet can handle most of that spam.
It is comfortable to know that all comments are relevant to recent posts, but with the post frequency going low and better spam control it would probably be a good idea to keep the comment form open for a longer time. Not to avoid being a poser, but to make sure that I get the feedback I keep on asking for.
October 28th, 2007 at 19:06
Who should I impress with going around as a blogger? I don’t regard is as a forum to spew my ego around, it’s my safety valve. Without it I probably would go insane for real.
But I do like a good discussion so thats why I never gonna close my comment function. Perhaps if the comments are way out of line I would react. But not close the comment field.
By the way, I do like that you occasionally take some of your precious time to give a helping hand to a Ubuntu/Linus newbie. I do hesitate to send you to many questions before I have given all other information sources a good search. But some times I can’t help sending it.
October 28th, 2007 at 19:12
BTW I bought i Ubuntu bible från Wileys. It only set me back with 299 Sek wich I regard as a bargain compared with other “bibles”. I found it at PC-City, the last place i would imagine selling them.
October 28th, 2007 at 20:34
Being part of a community is really what the Open-Source world is all about. I tired long time ago of jerks who simply reply with “RTFM” or “Google it!” instead of helping out. Sure, my time and energy is limited, but I try my best to help out anyone who has a question.
Not everyone is a developer, and not every developer has the time to help people out. So, I think it’s the responsibility of every user of Open Source-software to try to help other people out. Sitting on your knowledge as if it was a golden egg isn’t the proper way to go, it’s already to common among proprietary vendors to guard their knowledge in order to maintain “an edge” or other deprecated corporate secrets.
October 28th, 2007 at 20:44
I still give you my salute