Pros and Cons to Blocking Comments on Blogs

So we have already looked at the pros and cons to allowing comments on blogs so here are the pros and cons to blocking comments on blogs. It is important to remember that the decision you make on commenting does not have to stay the same for the whole life of your website. For a year, you might want to block comments for ‘X’ reasons. After the year, you might want to enable comments and see how it goes. If you do not like it, you can always block and remove comments whenever you want.

 

When you block comments on your blog:

• You prevent the ‘0 Comment’ articles – This especially happens for relatively new starter-up websites. If you allow comments when you do not have much traffic in, you will get a lot of articles that will have zero comments on them and for a long time too. Generally, this does not look good at it makes your articles look unwanted and like they are not useful to web users. For this reason, blocking comments prevents this from happening so it makes your articles look instantly more popular.
• You save time – If you have a lot of comments awaiting moderation, it can be quite time consuming replying to them and filtering the spam and troll comments! If I chose to block comments it would definitely save me a few hours of work a week in moderating them!
• You prevent hateful comments – You only have to look at YouTube at the amount of hate that people can sometimes put into comments. It is rather disgusting to say the least. Although you may feel you will not get hateful comments, the chances are that you will,at some point in your blog’s life. By blocking comments prevents those comments from ever being read by anyone.

However, when you block comments on your blog:

• You are preventing your audience from communicating – This is a big drawback because some of the comments can be very useful to you. For example, I get a few comments every blue moon about typos or mistakes I have made in my articles. If I had blocked comments, I would never have known about the mistakes or typos.
• It’s very lonely! – Why would a blogger write articles to people that he or she does not want to communicate with? If I did not allow comments, I would get quite lonely that I have no feedback on the tons of articles I am making to, what seems like, an imaginary non-communicative audience.
• You are hindering your website’s performance – Some web users will go on certain websites only because they can engage with the article through commenting. Therefore, if there is a similar website to your one with comments enabled, you will potentially be losing traffic to this comment-allowing alternative website.