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Kelvin Wangonya
Kelvin Wangonya

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Are comment sections useful/necessary for personal blogs?

I like to keep my site as simple as possible. Sometimes though, I feel like a comment section would be useful incase someone wants to ask a question on a blog post or leave some constructive criticism. On the other hand, I dislike the idea of having to use third party commenting systems like disqus. I also think implementing my own commenting system and requiring users to provide an email or something to comment is a bit overkill. This is the option I would go with though if I was to do it.

Does your site have a comments section? Do you think it's necessary?

Top comments (25)

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nottrobin profile image
Robin Winslow

I recently decided to add comments to my blog, having not had them for a long time.

I haven't had any spam yet and I have had some nice comments.

I wrote about it: robinwinslow.uk/i-now-support-comm...

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Ben Sinclair

I don't see the point. Unless you're massively famous, you'll only get a couple of comments and a bunch of spam.
Because you won't see much signal to noise, you'll forget you had comments turned on (even with your email notifications) and when you look back at a post in a year you'll find someone said something interesting but now it's way late.

They also look fairly bad if you're trying to have a professional site and they're always empty or only have someone's link to dodgy pharmacy sites.

Most people allow a way of contacting or continuing the discussion on social media platforms instead.

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Dor Shinar

I personally don't have, mostly because I haven't had the time to implement one and I haven't decided whether or not I want one. It's a good way to interact with your audience, but as you've said it makes your site more messy.

I always cross-post to Dev and Medium, so I can interact with readers from there.

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Kelvin Wangonya

Your blog looks great btw 😄

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dorshinar profile image
Dor Shinar

Thank you! I'm working on adding more content to it.

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wangonya profile image
Kelvin Wangonya

I agree. DEV provides a better platform for interactions.

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Loftie Ellis

There are more privacy focused alternatives to disqus (eg commento.io/) that might be an option.

Personally what I've been doing recently is to republish my articles on eg dev.to, and then linking to the comments there. It works nicely since then you have the primary source of content on your blog, but the comments are where the community is.

Eg: (see the bottom of the post) loftie.com/post/things-you-may-not...

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wangonya profile image
Kelvin Wangonya

That's a great idea. Does the like count increment automatically based on the likes on Dev.to?

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lpellis profile image
Loftie Ellis

Yup it uses the dev.to api to periodically refresh the likes

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wangonya profile image
Kelvin Wangonya

Awesome 👍🏽

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Alan Solitar

For me it hasn't been worth it. Right now I use disqus and even then I haven't gotten a single comment. It may be because a lot of my content speaks for itself, or perhaps my blog just isn't popular enough.

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Bayu Angora

I don't use any comment section on my website. If my readers want to discuss about my content, I let them to follow and discuss it on my social media.

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Kelvin Wangonya

I like that approach, but putting myself in the readers' shoes, I think it might be a bit of a hustle to take the conversation to social media. I personally wouldn't go that far just to point out a typo or some overlooked bug in the code (for technical/coding/tutorial-like posts). The reader might also not be on social media for their own reasons.

I think this would work better if as a reader, I came across the blog post on social media in the first place - maybe as a shared link or something. Then it would be easy just to add a comment directly from there. But if I accessed your site directly on the web, having to copy the link, leave the site and find you on social media to discuss it is a bit much. Unless the discussion is really really important.

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Bayu Angora

Beside I don't use any comment section, also I don't use any syntax highlights feature. Because most content of my website is not about coding or development, but about global issue such social, politic, literature, philosophy, etc.

So, if my readers want to discuss about it, they can mention me to discuss globally, not stuck to specific content. If my content is about coding or development, I think I will use syntax highlights and Disqus too.

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wangonya profile image
Kelvin Wangonya

Oh, I see. Yeah, social media will do great for your use case.

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Morten Olsrud

If you do decide to get a comment section, one way to ease the login/signup for them is to use social login from GitHub/Twitter.

You can also create some way for the posts to link to the article on twitter, i.e. a hashtag with the slug or something. Give them a big button to hit that sets up the template though.

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Thomas H Jones II

I use third-party blogging platforms (e.g. Blogger/BlogSpot) for both personal and technical blogs. Spammers are such a problem (seriously: I don't care how much BlueHost is paying you to crap-up randos' comments-sections, that you're crapping up my blog means I will never use their service) that I pretty much either wholly disable comments or I set them to be 100% "review before making visible".

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Keith Greer

How else is my mum going to tell me how lovely my latest blog is?

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Kelvin Wangonya

She can always share your posts on twitter to show her support 😄

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Nehal Hasnayeen

check utterances

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wangonya profile image
Kelvin Wangonya

Amazing. You know, I just might use this.

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Corey Johnson

I feel like a twist you could take on this is have a question section, because usually I feel like the comment section is really only useful to ask clarifying or expanding questions.

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Kelvin Wangonya

I think having a "Discuss on Twitter" link like Dan has on his blog is also a great idea.

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rhymes

Agreed. If I'd setup a blog I would have encourage people to have the conversation on platforms where they hang out, so DEV and Twitter