Thanks for some of the most intelligent observations on Blogging and commenting I have ever read! I often advise people on Blogging and yours is always one of the gold standards I offer up to aim for but how do you manage success?
It is a difficult balance and as ever you your finger right on the pulse! have an awesome time in New Zealand, it is a truely wonderous place.
Warmest regards, Mike
http://mikefarrow.net
You should look at Mollom (http://mollom.com/). Itâs a web service that uses machine learning to analyze potential spam and then give you the chance to show a CAPTCHA if that comment has spam potential. This way normal users donât have to answer a CAPTCHA but spam bots do. And since they analyze a large body of text coming from multiple sources they can spot trends before us individual sites can.
Iâm not affiliated with Mollom, Iâm just a happy customer.
Great to have comments back on, Jeff. To add to what Stéphane Charette said, I also merged some of the smarter comments to what you had to say, but for me YOUR comments (the ones with the orange background) were a must read, be it important commentary, points you neglected to cover in the original post and so on.
so - can we get the background color back?
Yes, it would be nice to have your comments back in that orange-ish yellow colour they were. Easier to tell you from the unwashed masses :D.
But in all seriousness, good to have you back. I missed your blog and itâs âsometime a weekâ updates.
Not really related, but one of the interesting usability issues I think youâre about to have to deal with on Stack Overflow is what to do when a site is so useful that itâs worth the effort of trying to post on it even if you donât know the native language very well.
And now I have to follow up to make it clear that Iâm not complaining, I think itâs an awesome problem to have and Iâd love to see something work. It will really require some community buy-in for native English speakers to not get frustrated and be patient with users who have trouble communicating what they mean.
@PoweredByRedBull: Jeff has used Wordpress, but for blog.stackoverflow.com and fakeplasticrock.com . Coding Horror has always been Movable Type.
I wonder, how did the 2 months of inactivity and no comments affect the readership? I notice the Feedburner counter is showing 100k, while Iâm nearly certain I saw it around 168k at some point.
Sigh. Yet another .Net blogger chooses a competing platform. Surely there was a viable asp.net-based choice? What do you use for blog.stackoverflow.com?
+1 for the voting system. Of course, it doesnât have to do as much ranking as on Stack Overflow, but itâs better than having your comments turn into something like this: http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1771556
And itâs great that you finally support so many authentication methods.
Finally. I was wondering why they were disabled and updates were few.
Er, Joe Coehoorn, why is choosing TypePad bad?
Hey Jeff,
so youâre coming to NZ? Awesome!! Youâll love it here⊠bring a raincoat⊠
And welcome back online. Iâve missed you. I understand your pain having been through it myself a couple of years back.
I was one of the webmasters managing a critical govt. website hosted externally that melted down. (hard drive failure) Our hosting provider then informed us that the backup was âtruncatedâ.
It took two weeks of frantic effort to get the site back to something resembling the original. (and we didnât even have to deal with comments!!)
I guess you could say you deserve a good holiday after all youâve been through. And what better place than NZ? (bring a raincoat⊠honestly) Hopefully Iâll catch you at Webstock.
So I guess Joel doesnât have a blog?
Welcome back comments. Very happy to see a new post and the comment system back in place.
Welcome back comments, indeed! Iâve been quite sad with several of your blog posts to reach the end and see that comments were turned off.
Am I the only one who misses âorangeâ? Ah well, march of progress and all that.
This brings up a great point - you rightly point out that the value of comments falls off a cliff after a certain number of viewers/responders is reached. Iâve always believed that there is a âsweet spotâ when it comes to allowing your users to post comments.
YouTube comments are a perfect example of the vocal but idiotic voices having their say with responses where it rapidly approaches the point where nobody values them. I hate to put it that way, but reality, as they say, is a bitch.
I think it is an interesting topic in itself. As a rookie blogger, youâre looking to grow your readership. While youâre in the growth stage, comments are critical for feedback and to foster a sense of community. Once you pass a certain threshold of popularity, the idea of âcommunityâ (however that is defined by the Internet hive-mind), breaks down rapidly and begins to detract from the value of your loyal reader feedback.
digg/Engadget/etc. style of commenting has always seemed a no-brainer to me. Your readers end up policing themselves by down-voting asinine comments such that they arenât viewed by your typical follower that is looking to gauge the reaction to your latest post. The Gawker community takes this a step further (or it did until recently) by disallowing anyone from posting unless they had a level of street-cred⊠errr⊠troll-cred?
Sorry, that ended up becoming an almost-blog-post-in-itself.
Regardless, Iâm glad to see comments are back, especially with the emphasis that you are putting (as with anything) on the quality of comments.
You should know, the commenting system seems to be buggy with Chrome. I had to switch to Firefox to post this.
Welcome back comments
Ortzinator, Jeol http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ has a blog but he doesnât post as much as Jeff
I practise like Steve Mayne too; I regularly read Coding Horror via RSS, and only read further on comments for the topics I am interested in getting a more âin depthâ perspective from what others have to state/suggest.
Because we know Jeff is oftentimes wrong 
Woohoo! Glad to be part a discussion with my (mostly) peers again. Thanks.
I am not a fan of OpenID. The only reason I set up an account is for StackOverflow. I am willing to maintain individual accounts with sites that I use regularly.
However, I have no intention of being a regular poster of comments on this blog, so OpenID came in handy here â I wouldnât comment at all if I had to set up an account just for this blog.
So, to me, OpenID is most useful for the sites where Iâm a transitory visitor.
FWIW.
Honestly I donât understand the feelings some people have towards comments. Not having comments means you have to think about the authorâs blog post, while with the comments you donât? Comments donât scale? Sure, moderation by a single person doesnât scale but lots of sites have more complex moderation. Forums donât scale either if you insist on moderating every post. As for people who worry that there will be too many comments to read, the answer is simple: donât read them.
Sometimes people complain about information overload or other related problems but there is a really simple solution for many of those things: donât read it. Too many comments? donât read them. Canât keep up with the forum posts? Just randomly scan forum topics and read a couple. The world DOES have too much information for any person to process. Just disconnect a bit.
And Jeff, your hate-on for email is a little weird. Email is great because it is so versatile. Why should you need twenty different communication tools when email can do everything?