On my perosnal blog I actually chose not to have any comments system, partly because I'm using Jekyll, a static site generator, and I chose loading time over en

On my perosnal blog I actually chose not to have any comments system, partly because I'm using Jekyll, a static site generator, and I chose loading time over encorporating a PHP or JS comments system, and partly also because, if someone has interesting enough to say, they can take the effort to let me know on twitter/email. I work for a publishing company, however, and I've found that the single biggest impact on comments, site traffic excluded, is the features your comments system offers. Of our eight websites, the site with the best rate of comments is also the one with the most sophisticated comments system. Taking last week's statistics as an example, it averaged one comment for every 30 page views, which is one comment for every five site visits. It actually saw slightly more comments than unique visitors. That's a pretty impressive achievement in my eyes, and while not the whole story, it is thanks largely to the way commenting works. The comments system on that site is a custom solution, created with AJAX/PHP, which dynamicly loads comments on page load. Among the best features are: - unread comments highlighted a specific colour (on our site, based on user accounts, could be based on IPs easily) - article lists / home page / etc shows comment numbers next to article links, including number of unread comments for the specific user viewing it - a panel showing the ten items most recently commented on - users can reply to a specific comment, this notifies the user they reply to On this site, the key goals of the comments system are to inrease user experience for regular visitors to the site, and to drive traffic, however for smaller sites such as personal blogs, it could also help in other ways. I for one never comment on personal blogs because I know I'll forget to check for replies - why not allow email subscription for less-frequent readers, or specific notification of a reply directly to a comment a user left? That's my biggest tip then: think in terms of "how can I make the commenting system more efficient, usably and enjoyable for my users?" - but of course, there are many other considerations, such as writing content that is more likely to inspire user discussion and feedback.