One of the things I love about Problogger.net is the value of the comments my readers make here.
Although the days when I could reply to many of those comments are now, sadly, long gone, I do read comments on the blog, and frequently get ideas and inspiration from them. Not only are they encouraging, they’re one of the best sources of thoughtful, spontaneous insight I have.Not all bloggers feel this way—you probably know of at least one or two big-name bloggers who don’t allow comments on their blogs. And it’s certainly true that comments come with a range of challenges:
- time: it takes time to wade through comments, sift the diamonds from the dross, and then compose thoughtful replies
- trolls: there’s no shortage of trouble-makers online, and it can be wearing to have to deal with trolls on a daily basis
- critics: some bloggers find criticism made in comments difficult to handle in such a public sphere
- stalkers: while this problem isn’t often discussed, inappropriate comments can be a problem—especially if they persist
- spammers: if you’re an experienced blogger, you probably rolled your eyes when you read that word!
Of course, these aren’t the only issues you need to consider in terms of comments on your blog. Which commenting system will you use? Will you set standards for accepting and rejecting comments? How can you use comments to enhance your blog—and your blogging?
The articles
We’ll be answering three of these questions today and tomorrow, in a series of posts that explore the issues of:
Before we get started, I’d love to hear your approach to blog comments (Do you have them on your blog? Do you comment on many others’ blogs?) in—you guessed it—the comments!
What you have written in this blog post is correct. It is common among most of the blog writers to have less time in checking the old blogs. They continue to write a lot of articles and over the period of time, it becomes difficult for them to keep account of it. So sometimes there are chances that when a person comments on an old blog, the time taken for the comments to get approved increases.
True! It happens often that we forgot to check our old posts and readers have to wait for their responses to be displayed.
I have comments on my blogs. It does take some time to deal with them, but they are very important to me and make it seem a lot less like me shouting at the wall 8=)
I wish that I had the problem of having to deal with answering a hundred comments per day, but the reality is that spam comments are mostly what I deal with.
I wrote a series of posts dealing with spam comments a while back and I’ve reposted them at my new List Marketing Adventure site. The first one is here.