Optimising your comments - email & RSS
So, if you’ve gone through the arguments for not having comments and the arguments for having them and come out on the side of commenting-your-arse-off then you are probably going to be thinking about how you can make the absolute most of them.
First up, forget about RSS. Seriously. The fairly prominent provision of the comments RSS feed in the development of WordPress has always confused me as there are only two possible uses, namely if you don’t want to receive an email when someone comments / tracks / pings your postings or if there’s something really important going into them (as with nominations for the edublog awards). Granted it’s useful to have RSS feeds for everything… but just don’t worry yourself too much about them here.
Because what you really want is a ’subscribe to comments’ function. Especially in the WP world as their subscribe to comments plugin is now absolutely state-of-the art. The amount of blogs that don’t use this absolutely amazes me because these are the net results:
no subscribe to comments facility = commentators post a comment with no real hope of it being replied to or of them checking if it has (apart from in the rare cases of ‘hub’ blogs). This is a typical bulletin board and the knowledge of these communication dynamics makes for totally different types of comments. Less engaged, less dialogic and, invariably thus, less frequent. (read more about that here)
a subscribe to comments facility = commentators know that they can simply engage on a conversation by checking a box. That is, it’s easy for them to throw in some ideas, read other peoples responses (as they’ve sucked them in through email) and come back and respond. Comment forms thus become places for *real* discussion rather than simply posting your thoughts and leaving them. They have more value and because of the possibility of audience are also much more motivated & thus more frequent.
I’m actually such a big fan of ’subscribe to comments’ that I provide the facility for people to subscribe to receive emails even if they haven’t made a comment themselves. And, as you may have noticed (& no-one has complained about so far) the subscribe box below is actually default ‘on’!
I would love for more blogs to implement this functionality, are you with me?
- Posted on: June 14th, 2005
- 4 Comments
- Category: Archives
Subscribe to RSS
Thanks so much for the kind words! I’m quite proud of the plugin. I also agree with you wholeheartedly about it’s usefulness. With any but the most active blogs, checking back manually for responses just isn’t an option for people, and RSS comments feeds never made much sense to me either.
I also default to having the “subscribe” box checked. It may be a bit sneaky, as there are probably some people who submit the comment without looking at the check box. My reasoning is this: if they think that their comment is so correct and final that they have no need of listening to any other voices on the matter, I think the onus should be on them.
I’ve also found that Subscribe to Comments functionality is instrumental in building a sense of community around smaller blogs that may not have as many readers. Once in a while I’ll leave a comment on a site, and then weeks later will get a reply. By then I’d forgotten all about the site and the comment I left, but because of the e-mail notification, I’m drawn back into the conversation. So in that way it’s a great way to develop “regulars.”
There are some features I’m considering for the next major version, including letting post authors notify all subscribers to that post when a major update is made to the posting, as well as allowing users to subscribe to comment digests (like 5 or 10 comments at a time, or a digest at the end of the day, for really active blogs.)
Feel free to submit bug reports and/or feature suggestions here.
Mark,
Those all sound absolutely fantastic… When I started blogging 3 years ago yours was one of the first plugins I was looking for (not like I would’ve gotten anything with Radio ;o) and I don’t think that I’ve installed anything that has had more of an impact.
Definitely would get my vote (*if I had one) for the plugin comp…. heck, I’d put it in the core if I had the chance!
Thanks for such a great tool!
I completely agree. I have this feature installed on my website, and while I don’t know how many use it, I always appreciate it when I see its availability on a website. I hate not knowing if others are replying to me, especially if it’s on a blog I don’t frequent or keep feeds on.
Also, thank you for posting the link to this plugin. I use a different plugin that isn’t this advanced, and I like this one a lot better.
It occurred to me that I don’t have the tag here which demos who has and who hasn’t subscribed to the comments… does anyone think that’s a problem or should be here? It’s kind of reassuring knowing who is / isn’t receiving this isn’t it!