Comments on blogs are something of a problem. It seems to boil down to two primary issues: spam and zealots.
Ditching Disqus
Couple of years back I implemented Disqus as a free comments system to handle the spam. Disqus replaces the comments on Worpdress, requires logins, has a central history of all commenters. The history is quite useful, you can look at their other comments to see if the person is a consistent hater/troll and this decide not to respond to the comment.
I’ve stopped using Disqus for two reasons. Speed and Privacy.
In an update this year, Disqus has implemented quasi-malicious user tracking. The updated privacy policy shows that they are now selling your data in bulk. They are also cross-promoting sponsored content in rather dubious ways. Not something I choose to be involved with.
But perhaps the most annoying part of recent changes is the Disqus is SLOW. Page load times are really poor even with delayed load, late fetching and “below the fold”. Since ditching Disqus six months ago, my page ranking and numbers of hits has increased substantially.
For all these reasons, Disqus is not workable. Which is a shame, I liked the social commenting and easy login to other peoples sites.
Troll Storms
About twice a year, I’ll get a “troll storm” where a flood of comments will arrive from a some person who is a committed zealot to their employer, persuasion or perspective. Given that I also tend to the opinionated or strongly committed view, I generally applaud and support this. But there is a line where people need to leave it alone.
Mostly I’m thick-skinned enough to ignore this and generally leave the comments on the post. I will simply delete comments that aren’t acceptable or just too weird. Sometimes I find the comments abusive or upsetting. I am working on many things and handling abusive comments isn’t something that
Wordpress Comments
On returning to using Wordpress comments I found that Akismet has significantly improved and capturing all the spam. In addition, I have disabled comments on posts older than 30 days which has also reduced the noise. I would rather not do this but I’m just not interested in wasting my time administering comments anymore.
I’ve decided that I would prefer to write and share whatever I have to day. And focus what time I have for writing other things instead of moderating comments.
If you want to make a comment on an old post or have an alternative opinion, then write a blog post and post it online somewhere with pingbacks enabled. I will ensure that the pingback is approved and people can find your response or opinion.