Should You Disable the Comment Feature on Your Blog?



Disable the comment feature on your blog?  What?  It's downright scandalous, right?  After all, we bloggers LOVE comments.  They remind us that others are reading our blogs and are connected enough with our blog that they want to take the time to leave a comment.

Still, some sites such as Copyblogger are removing the comment feature from their site.  Should you do the same?

Advantages To Removing The Ability to Comment


1.  No more spam comments.  Spam comments are not only annoying, they can take up your precious time as you scroll through comments and manually remove the spam.  Removing the ability to comment means that you never have to deal with spam comments again.  That's worthy of a cheer, right?

2.  Your readers may engage more on your social media sites.  If readers can't leave comments on your blog, they may be more likely to leave comments on your other social media sites.  People are already doing this on Facebook.  You leave a link to your post on Facebook, and rather than comment on the blog post itself, they comment on your Facebook status update.  This makes your page more engaging.

Disadvantages To Removing The Ability to Comment


1.  Your readers may feel disconnected.  Some readers like to leave comments on the blog post.  They may feel more isolated and disconnected from you as a blogger because they can't interact with you on your site.

2.  You lose material for future posts.  Over the years, you may have noticed some really great discussions come from the comments.  Readers may ask you questions that you can develop into entirely new posts.  If you don't allow comments, all that interaction and future material is gone.

3.  You may get more email.  If readers can't connect with you on the comment section, they may instead contact you via email, which may take up more of your time as you respond to these fans who cared enough to take the extra step to contact you.

For most bloggers, removing comments isn't necessary or even recommended.  Although fewer and fewer readers are leaving comments, giving them a place to do so if they want is still the best option for most bloggers.

Do you allow comments on your site, or have you stopped allowing comments?  If so, why?

3 comments:

  1. I don't think you should disable comments. How would you ever get any feedback, good or bad. When I read a particularly good posting, I comment on how much I enjoyed. it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I allow them, because I think it really improves communication with readers. I changed the configuration so that anonymous comments are not allowed, which helps a little with spam. They still come to my email (which is very annoying), but they don't flood my blog posts.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I allow them - I love the feedback and the funny stories people share after I post a story about my son.

    ReplyDelete

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