wangarific

One of the cited “strengths” of blogs is that they offer readers the ability to comment. You could communicate with the author, they would reply, other readers could reply, and this small community could develop. It’s part of the reason why you see many news sites adopt commenting features to that people can “respond.”

While this is all still true, it doesn’t happen without some extra help. Out of the box, Wordpress and other blog software packages do offer rich commenting features but there are definitely add ons that will make the experience much much better.

One such example is a “Subscribe to Comments plugin” type of plugin. The one I use is available for download here. It has some nice extra features that I appreciate, like rudimentary security, but the main purpose is to let popular posts take on a life of their own.

Posts Live Forever

The most commented post on Bargaineering is one about United First Financial Money Merge Accounts with over 850 comments. It was written in mid-2008 but the latest comment was 12/12/2009. Several of the comments have multiple replies because of a small group of dedicated readers (like JoeTaxpayer who has since started his own blog!) helping educate people on the perils of the program.

You probably won’t look back through all 850+ comments but if you did, you’d see that the comments appear in spurts. You have a visitor who comes via a search engine and leaves a comment. A subscriber to that post (there are currently 31) will see the comment and come back to respond (more often than not, it’s Joe and it’s great because he’s very smart and totally understands the faults of the system inside and out).

This cycle repeats a long long time. Another example is the Rent Forever, Don’t Buy A Home post. It has 31 subscribers and over 400 comments. It was written in early 2007 and the latest comment was 12/28/3009.

Don’t Auto-Subscribe Commenters

If you install this plugin, do not auto-subscribe commenters. It will spam them, create a horrible user experience, and if I find out I’ll reach through the interwebs and throttle you.

The goal isn’t to trick people who don’t want to participate into participating. The goal is to make it easier for those who do.

If you have success stories using similar subscribe to comment plugins, please share them!