Comments Go Dark on GIS Blogs
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Is there an emerging movement among GIS bloggers to permanently turn off comments on their blogs? Two bloggers, Atanas Entchev and James Fee, recently blogged about their decisions to turn off comments. Why? Two reasons were highlighted: comment spam and social media.
The dramatic increase in spam has made moderating comments a drudgery. In explaining why he turned off comments, Atanas Enchev noted on his blog, “I started this blog in 2006. Comments were open. I saw the occasional comment spam, cleaned it up once or twice per day. This continued until about six months ago, when the blog started receiving a ton of SEO comment spam, the majority originating in Russia and India.” GIS Lounge is no stranger to the onslaught of spam comments. In the past year, over 45,000 spam comments were posted to the site. Added to that is the heavy posting of comments from job seekers. Comments are moderated and occasionally, real comments are posted and are approved.
Explaining that geospatial discussions have moved on to Twitter and Facebook, James Fee also turned comments off on his blog. As he noted in a tweet to Atanas Entchev, “years ago comments were the only place for people to be heard. Now they are more likely to tweet or like on Facebook.”
Tags: atanas entchev, comments, gis blogs, James Fee
In my opinion, good authentic comments are still happening! Now, they just take place off site in the social media silos of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. They are just more distributed, and measured differently. A blogger can still gauge comments in these silos with tools like Google Analytics.