Shooting at Bubbles

Blogs live and breath because of comments.

For me they are the life blood of blogging. They are the rich tapestry of conversation around ideas that add so much value to what bloggers write. Sure there are the fluff you r0x0r type crap but for the most part they are overshadowed by comments that are sometimes worth of blog posts by themselves.

The problem is that comments are dying. At least the comments on the originating blogs are, if not dying, slowly fading away. Instead we are seeing them happening on social network sites like Facebook, Buzz, Twitter and others like them – many of which bloggers will never see or read.

I don’t blame our readers for deciding to move away from the blogs themselves, even if I really hate that it is happening. After all commenting has become a tangled web of sign-ons and other hindrances which do more to dissuade people from commenting at the original source. So in turn bloggers are put in a position of having to make sure their content is available everywhere possible. Personally I think this dilutes the pool of great conversations but like I said I understand.

I get it when Linda Lawrey writes on Buzz

NO COMMENT – Why I quit commenting on websites and blogs. It’s really very simple. Your comment system sucks. I just commented on a site (a nice comment I might add) after swearing I wasn’t going to do it anymore, only to get the message “Your comment has been flagged as spam”. WTF. I KNEW it. I just KNEW that my comment was a waste of my time and energy there. I SHOULD have linked to it here at Buzz, and then commented here. First, I would have been able to follow my and other comments here, and secondly, it would have gone through. No hassle, no spam, no flag and no bullshit. And unless I comment to tell you that I’ve done so, YOU are the one missing the conversation about your post.

I get the anger – I’ve felt it myself.

I get the frustration – been there myself.

Even with all that anger and frustration though what isn’t understood though, at least from the reader’s point of view, is that administering comments has become a war zone for bloggers.

I’ve tried all of the third party commenting platforms. For various reasons I decided that they weren’t for me and now use just the default WordPress commenting system. Granted in most cases this is a really boring system compared to the fancy Disqus or JS-Kit systems but at least it is in my control – all of it. This means that it is up to me to try and make it more useful, to give the readers and easier route to comment here instead of somewhere else.

The problem is that bloggers are in a constant conflict with spammers and other cretins who try to ruin the commenting experience for others. In some cases bloggers have given up the fight only to create a hideous commenting experience for those that do want to make comments; or they have farmed it out to third party systems and rely on them to keep everything safe.

Maybe I’m anal but I can’t do either of those things. I value the comments left here (even if I don’t get around to replying to them all – but they do get read) which means I have to do everything I can to make sure the spammers and other cretins don’t gain a foothold. I previously wrote about how I had decided to go the route of moderating the first comments from people just to make sure they were actually valid comments. As well I turned off the pingbacks and trackbacks as they were flooding the blog with spam.

However the spammers in their infinite patience always find new vectors of attack with the latest of using either very clever software or real humans to post comments. The reason for this is to get around things like CAPTCHA’s or other tests that bloggers try to institute to keep them out. The problem with this is that it makes it even harder for good people to leave good comments.

The battle that bloggers fight to try and make it easier; and a better experience, for people to leave their valued comments is on-going – it never stops. If I totaled up the amount of time I spend in a day you’d probably wonder why I bother; but like a lot of bloggers I do because I value your contributions.

It’s easy to get mad like Linda and blame the bloggers for ruining their experience which lead them to write things like Linda did

You want comments? Moderate them YOURSELF. Quit relying on inefficient comment systems to do it for you. They DON’T work. I filled in my FULL name, my email address, a link to my google profile here, and I do the captcha MATH that you put in front of me and you still think I’m spam?

Trust me Linda when I say that if bloggers didn’t need to do things like this we wouldn’t. I would love nothing better to let the comments flow freely. Trust me as well when I say that a great number of bloggers work very hard at trying to keep assholes at bay but it isn’t easy. Do some bloggers go overboard? Probably but at some point it becomes so overwhelming and time consuming that we find ourselves resorting to extraordinary measures.

One last note.

At some point even bloggers have enough with constantly having to fight spam coming from the same hosting servers day in and day out. Such is the case with me today. For the last couple of months I have been inundated with spam comments that have been originating from the Ubiquityservers domain. So in what could be considered a nuclear option I have blacklisted them from my blogs – all of them. If need be I’ll block their complete IP range at the server.

Personally I would love it if every single blogger blacklisted them and do the same with domain addresses that support this kind of thing. Sure some good people might get caught in the crossfire but as they say all’s fair in love and war and make no mistake about it bloggers are in a war with these assholes.

So to people like Linda let me say this. I understand your anger but please understand also that bloggers don’t want to be in this position. We don’t like having to make your experience in leaving comments a pain in the ass and we are sorry when it happens.

But perhaps you should be aiming your anger and frustration at the people who really deserve it.