Recently I removed the ability to subscribe to comments from this site. I’d been testing out MT Notifier for a while, but although it’s a great plugin it had started to cause me to receive a huge amount of spam.
The very helpful Chad Everitz offered me a number of ways to fix this problem. However, I wasn’t sure it was worth the hassle so I just got rid of the plugin.
This got me to wondering whether I’d just removed a feature that people liked and used. Personally, I never subscribe to comments and I’ve seen plenty of highly trafficked sites which don’t provide the ability for readers to do this.
So, my guess is that no one misses this feature too much. But I thought it might be interesting to conduct a poll to find out for sure.
Here’s the link to the poll [now closed] for RSS readers.
About this Poll
Zoho Polls recently entered the crowded online polling space so I thought I’d give them a test drive.
Creating a poll is quick and easy and you can choose between two types — one where you vote and one where you rate different choices. The rating option is nice and sets it apart from other polling tools.
On the downside, no customization is possible via the Zoho Polls interface and as you can see the fact that if you have five options you get a vertical scroll bar is extremely annoying.
Although you can change the size of the poll by altering the code for the <iframe> that embeds it into your site, making the poll taller just makes the space at the bottom of the poll larger.
My verdict is that there are better options out there.
I think it depends on how often someone comments on different blogs. As a person who comments quite a lot on several blogs, I always use the ‘Subscribe to Comments’ feature where I can find it, but it probably isn’t utilised as often by others.
So no, it’s not necessary, but there’s no harm in having it anyway 🙂
The only comments I have ever subscribed to were boagworld.
I nearly always subscribe to comments if the facility is there.
I never subscribe to comments, but then I hardly comment anways.
You may want to look at co.mments.com. I almost always track my comments, and this service allows me to track any ongoing conversation all in one place.
*Yvonne* – you’re right that there’s no harm in having this feature … except for the fact that it was causing me no end of spam problems. If it wasn’t for that I would have kept it.
*William* – then I’m honored to have you comment here! 😉
*DavidC* – I’ve wondered about co.mments.com before. I know you can optimize your blog for it. However, I wasn’t sure if it had a critical mass of users yet for it to be worth my doing anything as far as it is concerned.
I’ll suscribe if the discussion is really good, or if something is a really hot topic.
No, I don’t. Why? Spam, plus they’re better options out there (namely coComment & Commentful).