Comments Closing After 90 Days
If you are into internet marketing you probably are very familiar with PHP-master, Robert Plank. He is a tremendous inspiration in the sense that he started by saying he wouldn’t create another post on his blog before he had at least 10 comments. He then upped the levels to 50, and now often manages to get 100 comments. That is a good level of user-interaction. One that I wish all readers would follow.
But the truth of the matter is that oftentimes you would struggle just getting twenty comments from an article. One article on this blog has been a real pain in the back side because it dealt with article databases – published in the beginning of 2010. It has caused Akismet to go virtually nuts as this is apparently a favorite subject for spammers. At least one third of all spam comments blocked by Akismet has been from that ONE article alone…
I can’t stress how much this annoys me in one sense. The database running the blog software almost overcooks due to this, and I only had two options:
- Adding a captcha field to submit comments
- Blocking comments for articles older than 90 days
I will have to see what happens. Adding a CAPTCHA field is one I don’t want to do because it often causes compatibility issues with mobile browsers, and I won’t disrespect any reader for using whatever he/she feels like using. On the other hand, I do also recognize that a huge amount of traffic comes from search engines – and you might run into an article that IS indeed older than 90 days before you read it.
What would you do in a situation such as this? I do want to see what you, who read this blog, think of such a catch-22 situation. Feel free to comment for 89 days. YOUR reply could very well change the decision in a smarter way than I may have outlined and discovered. Thanks beforehand for any thoughts you may have. 🙂