Habitually Good

I read a lot of blogs and they all have their own comment systems - most commonly people have the standard stuff like I have on this blog: simple, unthreaded, linear comments. Then again other blogs have nested comments which allow you to reply to a particular comment, and it forms a thread. Of course then there are all the little features, where you can rate comments, follow commenters, and so on. So, how does one decide what type of comments system to use on a blog (and why I use the one I do).

I think it’s related to volume - it’s the number of comments which should dictate this choice. For example, I get on between 2-10 comments on any post on this blog. At this stage, the best experience I can offer to my users is a very simple to use commenting interface.

Take a look at the Naive Indian - his typical post gets between 5-20 comments. He uses a nested comments model (through a plugin called intense debate). I personally feel that for such a small number of comments, such a system is an overkill. The first thing you notice about his blog is that the home page sort of hangs when you load it, before it shows the Recent Comments on the sidebar (courtesy the comments plugin i think) and also when you open a post, the comments take a while before they load up. Although, I feel that he is laying a foundation for discussion on his blog (his selection of topics will usually spark a debate), it still may be too early to put in something like this with so few comments.

On the other extreme is Coding Horror. Every post on this blog gets at least a 100 comments. And yet the comments on this blog are not nested at all and there is no rating system. As a frequent reader, it becomes a chore to go through all the comments to make sure that you don’t miss any useful input from the readers. There are usually a number of conversations going on in the comments, and if these were nested, it would be very easy to go through the long list of comments (I could ignore certain conversations completely).

The other thing is your audience - of course, other than nesting, the other features such as rating and following commenters depends on the type of audience you have. If you have too many fickle comments you may want a rating system for quality comments to rise up (once again you would need a large number of commenters and readers for this to work). And if there are active commenters who have a good thing to say on most topics, then a follow commenter feature would be useful as well.

Well, that is my 2 bits on what I think about comments. What do you think?

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