I am curious to know why people would want comments to be made on their blogs. I have a couple blogs and even though I have it set not to allow people to make comments I still get loads of spam comment submissions. It seems to me like it would be a full time job just moderating those comments to delete all the spam.
Allowing people to make comments builds a sense of community and participation, which helps bring visitors back again and again. With WordPress there are some good spam prevention measures such as Akismet, Spam Karma, CAPTCHA's and other custom measures.
Spam Karma is great. Comments are a sign that people visit your blog. Also it shows the activity of the blog. More comments, more lively. Usually people who comments come back for more. That i what i realize anyways
Do you know blogs that gets tonnes of comments got crawled by Google bots more frequently? This is because a comment is like updating your posts or the page.
I find that I get lots of useful information and feedback from my visitors via comments. I also find that a contact form on my site gets me lots of enquires about a whole range of things.
A lot of the SPAM comes from the ping option. Turn that off for each post and you will greatly reduce the crap you need to delete.
Sometimes its useful to know which sites are linking to you... however, it is hard work dealing with the spam.
Thanks for the input everyone. I am trying to look at this from a different viewpoint. I will defintely consider everyone's advice and input.
comments also measures how popular your blog is and measures on how many returning visitors your blog is getting
Hi, If you have it set not to accept comments, then how do you receive spam? I have mine set that you have to be registered to make a comment, but also have registrations turned off. I'm using wordpress. .. just curious Also, if anyone wants to say something about something I've written, they can contact me. I guess I'd put that on the blog then.... (maybe)
I have a couple blogs and also have friends who have blogs. You can have everythign set not to accept comments but the comments will still get through if the spammers find you. The only way I have found to stop them completely was to remove the comments.php file. However, since I installed akismet I have actually receieved very little spam.
Thanks for the tip! I use the "Anti Email Spam" WordPress plugin, too, and that seems to be reducing the amount of spam I'm getting...
I like comments on blog posts that have instructions for how to do somthing & always skim over them before following the instructions. Comments are like a changelog, known issues, & FAQ all-in-one in that capacity.
I'd HIGHLY suggest using Akismet, if available for your blog script. It'll block most spam. There may be a few other spam blocking/discouraging plugins, like Captcha, to decrease the amount of spam. Comments seems to show activity to both the readers and Google. This would be the reason people would want visitors to comment, along with having a handy way to see who commented and read their blog too. You could join the dofollow or U Post/I follow community. You may also want to say something like, "all comments are moderated. Please post thoughtful comments or they will likely not be approved", or something to that effect. Here's the official Google Blog on preventing comment spam.
Why would you not want comments. I would prefer to be able to interact with my readers. Getting feed back is always good.