No Comment

One of the debates at JournalCon was whether or not journals should have comments. Some people felt their voice would be diluted if other people's words were there right after an official entry. Other people like having the immediate feedback right where everyone can read it. It's proof that you have readers, for one thing.

One anti-comments position was that when you listen to an album, you don't hear a song and then listen to the reviews of that song. On the other hand, if the comments are unabashedly positive, it's sort of like the applause on a live album. I've been mostly in favor of having comments, because the comments I get are mostly positive. There are exceptions, of course. When I said I hated Kill Bill, things went crazy and I got a lot of comments for and against the movie. I have nothing against that as far as it goes, but people started arguing with each other and insulting each other and eventually I just turned the comments off. I mean, commenting is one thing, but this isn't a message board over here.

One of the most popular entries I have, at least as far as comments go, is Harry Potter vs. Lord of the Rings. I was just idly speculating before any of the movies came out, but since that entry is a pretty popular result on Google, I got a lot of fanboys and fangirls of both sides. The entry looks odd now because the formatting has been thrown off. It seems people just can't put enough "O"s in "SOOOOOOO" to convey the depth of their feeling. I've left the comments on that entry alone, because they entertain me a little.

What does not entertain me is this new thing where peddlers of Viagra, Internet Casinos, or whatever come to infest my comments feature. At first, they were just outright posting "for Viagra, go here". But that behavior got their comments deleted, obviously. Then they tried being more subtle, just saying innocuous compliments like "I like your site" and hoping that the link from their name would generate traffic. I have to say, I think they're overestimating the degree to which this site can be used to find buyers.

So now I'm thinking of turning off the comments, because I'm having to delete a couple of spam comments a week, and that number is only going to go up. Before I go that far, though, I'm going to see if I can delete the URL/Email part of the comments form. Maybe they won't bother me if they can't get a link.