Michael P. O'Connor

My Life

Question for my visitors

Categories: Blog Stuff, Web Site

Comments: 5 Comments

Published on: January 16, 2006

I have a question for my regular visitors, should I set all my posts to have comments enabled for x number of weeks, then disable them. I fear is that one of my regular visitors might want to post a response to a post I made a while back and they would be prevented from doing it. So I wish to ask my visitors should I put a limit on how long comments can be posted on. I am thinking about it since spammers go for older posts and ignore newer posts. Please help me make a choice here, since the comments (well the ones I let though) are from my readers.
The choice for how long are 1 week, 2 weeks, 4 weeks, or 8 weeks, if you think I should put a limit on the time you can post a comment on the posts.

5 Comments

Mark Rauterkus says:

January 16, 2006 at 6:42 am

Yes. I’m not going to comment on a blog entry from months ago. You have to stay fresh. It would be good to turn off comments for any blog post that is more than 30 days old. I wish I had that feature in blogspot.
Rob says:

January 16, 2006 at 6:49 am

1. WP 2.0 has some features that I like,including moderated comments for new posters and something called Akismet that detects spam. I don’t know what software you’re using.

2. Most people don’t comment on a post after a couple weeks. Simply edit the template for closed comments (simply? I hate editing templates!), explaining why you were forced to do this and ask them to e-mail you.

3. There are plug-ins for e-mail generating scripts for WP, and perhaps yours. It’s basically a comment form that sends an e-mail to you. If you could get that to come up on the closed page, the spammerbots wouldn’t know what to do with it. So people can post comments in a much more direct fashion, while comments are still closed to the bots. You’d have to go in and add the comment manually, as it would essentially be a moderated comment, but it would hardly inconvenience your commenting readers.

4. BTW: Thanks for all the comments you leave. I hope you notice they’ve influenced the series I’m working on.
Michael P. O'Connor says:

January 16, 2006 at 9:01 pm

1) I thought about moving my blog. but I don’t really want to lose my old posts, If could get a script, or write one, to move my old posts and comments.

2) Well I am thinking of turning of the comments (hence the post) but the software I use (bblog) has built in ability to turn off comments after x number of weeks after the post has been put up.

3) I will have to look into this thanks

4) I did notice that, and I am honored that you have made posts based on my comments on your blog.
Jim says:

January 17, 2006 at 7:20 am

I say keep them active. New people surf into my blog all the time, and occasionally I get new comments on old posts. It’s nice to bring an older topic to the front again. There are several ways to stop spam — WordPress has Akisment, which seems to work pretty well and transferring your database (if you have access to the server) is pretty easy. There is also various capcha software that you can install that requires image confirmation for each comment. It’s an extra step for your readers to submit comments, but it effectively shuts down ALL spam. Feel free to email me if you have questions.
Max says:

January 17, 2006 at 8:10 pm

I scrolled down your entire page… first comment is December 15th. I highly doubt anyone is following up on any old comments that are any more than 3 page-down’s from the top, let alone that far down. I’d say a month TOPS, 2 weeks is too soon, you might not post much stuff in all that time (*gasp*)