If the problem is the “delete my duplicate post” and “delete the flame” issue, you have to be getting a lot of comments and a lot of traffic before that takes more than one or two minutes a day. If I was getting that traffic volume and didn’t have time to handle it myself, I’d consider hiring someone to help before I handicapped my blog.

Http://blog.ashbaughonline.com

In Steve’s case he is getting the level of traffic that required quite a bit of time to respond. He also posted very long replies to some of his readers. His case may be warranted but I really miss the interactivity that his blog created. As far as trackbacking to a post on your own blog, I have sent trackbacks to numerous sites but many times they don’t go through so I’m not sure if that is a complete solution.

At that point, I think it would be prudent to turn off the comments and invite readers to e-mail you and let them use trackbacks to link their thoughts to yours. I believe that Seth’s decision to do this was a good one and has made his message all the more clearer to those who link to him via trackback.

http://www.jonwatson.ca/blog/?p=430

I agree with Seth Godin. In the long term, I think that forcing respondents to forumulate complete blog entries on their own sites to respond to something I may have said is ultimately more productive than allowing people to write ‘I disagree’ or ‘you suck’ under a post that I have written.

I do acknowledge that the type of blog definitely comes into play.I think on a personal blog, it might be beneficial to the entire blogosphere.

I’m not ready to do it yet though :)

It wasn’t really about the spam. The main issue was the opportunity cost. I felt the traffic growth made comments unsustainable in the long run, at least for the level of quaity interaction I wanted to maintain.

Long before turning off comments I’d employ ever SPAM and barrier to comments available, including registration.

Yout referecnce to Seth Godin is interesting – I thought of him first when readin gyour post. As I understand it, Seth’s opposition to comments is based in an opposition to anonymity.

The solution for me was to disable comments for those specific blog entries, if your blog software (I use blojsom) supports that concept. That may be a good middle ground for some people.

besides: comments are extremely important – in my case: many times information from comments was something I couldn’t find anywhere else and was lifesaviour.

only idiots or arrogant pricks like Dave Winer are switching off comments.

It’s one of the criteria that helps me keep the feeds I read down around 100. You gotta have a few parameters.

I unsubscribe from blogs that turn them off. We link to Steve, so this one’s been hard for me, but I’ll make a decision this weekend.

Reasoning: I don’t need people to force their opinion on me, on a regular basis, with no recourse. If I liked that type of info, I’d read a newspaper or magazine.

It’s no longer a blog, to me, if it doen’t allow comments. But, again, that’s just for me. Everybody gets their own interpretation and can do what works for them.

(1) wordpress plugin “Spam-Karma-2 Reloaded”
(2) my traffic is very low and spamming my site doesn’t help the spammers! Maybe it even penalizes them!

But – I wish I had more interaction in my own comments – like here. On all my blogs, I also include RSS feed links for the comments …

There is no link here, but it was easy to add ProBlogger comments feed to my Bloglines with the bookmarklet script .. P.S. In Bloglines, the comments are all over the place and very unformatted. You can’t tell what post is being commented, unless it’s a trackback. It needs work or possibly just burning a feed with Feedburner might fix it ?

The good news is that I’ve been reading a lot of older posts that I never knew existed or, didn’t understand completely reading it the first time around. I am impressed how many comments you are receiving from i.e. 2004 articles and early 2005 articles.

I leave comments on Steve’s site too and I find his readers leaving very valuable and thoughtful comments that could benefit other readers as well. It’s a pity that he decided to turn it off. I hope he will at least accept trackback link like Seth Godin is doing.