Comments, like blogs, are just tools. It is up to us to make use of this feature.

In a perfect world, I’ll have a team moderate and answer all comments, but alas it is not possible in every situation when you have a business to run and choose whether to spend your time on A or B, not both.

Thanks for bringing this out for comment!

* There are many Twitter users who don’t use their real name, same as they don’t leave their real details in comments, same as they have pseudonyms on forums. If they don’t want to be known, they won’t. If they do, they will. This will be true of all the mediums they use.

* Blog comments foster a community (the responses on this thread, for example) much the same as community-building in forums. The focus need not be on the blog author, either – if that was the case, then there would be closed comments and all the interaction would stop at reading the blog post.

Obviously everyone is different, and I know my blog comments don’t add up to the hundreds that Chris Brogan, Rob Scoble and the likes get. But even if they did, I’d still like to think I’d be communicating with my readers in the comments section.

My own personal view is that the comments add to the quality of a blog. Community comes in many shapes and sizes. Some would argue that it takes more time moderating a multi-threaded, multi-tiered forum than it does one blog post thread.

At the end of the day, there are fans of open comments and those that oppose them. Each has their reason why and if it works for them. I personally prefer open comments and many others would agree.

But for all of *us* there will always be bloggers in the other camp. And if that works for you, cool.

1. People have to explicitly address my name in the tweet.
2. Their followers will also see their behavior
3. They are less likely to be anonymous or else no one will see their tweets anyway.
4. I don’t follow everyone back. It appears only on the “reply” column on my TweetDeck as “one” tweet.
5. Don’t have to moderate comments or approve them or anything. It takes a split second to neglect these tweets.

I’m sure I can come up with more reasons… And as to forums, it allows other forum regulars to answer the questions too. Community is what I plan to build, without a focus on me.

I can go on and on with more reasons, but here’s another. Can’t reveal too much though because it is my business model.

In the future I’ll provide installation and customization services. People who want support for my opensource plugins and other popular plugins for free may go to the free community support for help – which is the forum.

Of course, I still have to answer the questions in the forums at first. But as the community grows, other participants will also use the forums to help others and perhaps get clients out of their participation.

And if people prefer to have someone accountable for such things, I (and my team) are available for hire.

Based on my experience, managing comments can be time consuming. If I am to enable the feature, I want to do it right, mainly because I want to maintain the quality of the blog.

That’s also why you see me leave a lot of comments here on your blog.

But for most posts, I’d prefer if my readers want to discuss something, they do it using Twitter or the forum. I know it’s basically a hindrance rather an encouragement to participate but in this case I really prefer they do it in other ways.

Rather than telling others about “I use this, I use that.” or “Your list sucks”, I’d rather focus on doing something else. I guess you’ve visited a site where most of the comments are “me too” type of comments. This is what most likely going to happen in such blog.

There are two sides of a coin. For your plugin example, inexperienced blogger may promote a SEO plugin that they like, but the fact is they know very little about the topic. That would ruin the list rather than helping it, because most visitors don’t know enough which comments to trust and which don’t.

If people experience difficulties with the tested plugin, they should report to the plugin developer through one way or another to get it fixed. Rather than testing other random plugins from the comments.

Sometimes silence is just gold. Communication can be distractive at times. As much as I like to interact with people, I still need to shut everything down during the time when I need to get my work done.

And to protect my time, I decided certain types of posts in this blog don’t really need comments.

With your blog, for example, even though it’s an informative-led one, wouldn’t it be nicer to have other bloggers share their tips on what they use alongside your recommendations? One blogger’s plug-in may be another blogger’s pet hate, for instance?

That’s a bizarre post over at Newbury – seems strange to close comments on what should be a community blog. There are way too many spam filters, profanity blockers, etc, available now to use the excuse Mr Moi is using.

And worrying about whether people are saying bad stuff or not? They already are – but you’re giving them fuel to the fire by not having discourse. Just my thoughts.

Cheers Ari, always a pleasure.