4 ms·

What's the best way to hear from your audience? Comments on the blog (e.g. disqus), or Twitter? Managing spam is such a burden that hosting your own feedback fa

What's the best way to hear from your audience? Comments on the blog (e.g. disqus), or Twitter? Managing spam is such a burden that hosting your own feedback facility is risky.

PuffinBlue 8y ago
I turned off comments and allow people to contact me through Twitter or email. That seems to be such a high barrier to entry that the contact I do receive is almost always because someone disagrees strongly or because they are very thankful for something they learned. In either case, it stops pointless crap like 'first'.
- veddox 8y ago
  Just out of interest, how active was your blog? (hits/day?) I don't have a commenting feature on my blog - partly because I haven't gotten around to setting it up yet, partly because I'm worried about potential spam. But I would like to get some feedback from my readers, so that's a bit of a conundrum...
  - KajMagnus 8y ago
    I built a Disqus like commenting system, where you can configure manual review of [the first X posts a new person posts at your blog]. If they write say 5 make-sense interesting things, hopefully thereafter it's ok to auto approve their subsequent posts. — How does this affect (if at all) how you feel about spam? (Here it is: https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments ) If you think someone might become a spammer, and is just posting "I like it" and "Wow great" comments to get past any first-comments manual reviews, then you can mark that user as a possible threat, and forever get notifieid about his/her posts (before they're made visible).
    - veddox 8y ago
      That looks good! However, I already had my sights set on Isso (https://posativ.org/isso/ https://posativ.org/isso/). My static site generator coleslaw (https://github.com/kingcons/coleslaw https://github.com/kingcons/coleslaw) already offers a plugin for this, so it is a more natural choice...
      - KajMagnus 8y ago
        Coleslaw seems to have many nice features. Hadn't heard about it before
  - PuffinBlue 8y ago
    I'm not 100% sure. Before I turned of analytics I was getting somewhere between around 16k-20k uniques per month. I don't know the accuracy on that, one was Google analytics, one as server based but filtering out the bots, so perhaps caught a few blocking the trackers (like I do TBH). That was nearly 7 months ago I guess? Looking in Webmaster search console it says I had 15.5k clicks and 237k impressions last 28 days (compared to 17k/297k 7 months ago), so maybe there are less visitors now. Not sure. I might turn the analytics back on at some point to find out!
CM30 8y ago
Both? Most successful blogs and news sites I've seen tend to have multiple ways for their audience to contact them. Usually comments for posts plus accounts on various major social media sites and some sort of chat feature (for gaming sites nowadays it's often Discord, though it could be a forum, or Slack or IRC). Of course, you then have to strike a balance between getting setup on every platform under the sun (and spreading yourself too thin) or putting all your eggs in basket (and depending too heavily on traffic from a single source or platform). But yeah, there are usually multiple ways for people to contact successful blog authors.
darekkay 8y ago
I guess it mostly depends on your audience and traffic. I've blogged about different ways to handle user feedback [0] (in the context of static sites). If you don't like to self-host comments, there are many third-party or off-site alternatives. For a developer blog, you might even use something like GitHub issues. [0] https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/ https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/

What's the best way to hear from your audience? Comments on the blog (e.g. disqus), or Twitter? Managing spam is such a burden that hosting your own feedback facility is risky.

PuffinBlue 8y ago

I turned off comments and allow people to contact me through Twitter or email. That seems to be such a high barrier to entry that the contact I do receive is almost always because someone disagrees strongly or because they are very thankful for something they learned. In either case, it stops pointless crap like 'first'.

veddox 8y ago
Just out of interest, how active was your blog? (hits/day?) I don't have a commenting feature on my blog - partly because I haven't gotten around to setting it up yet, partly because I'm worried about potential spam. But I would like to get some feedback from my readers, so that's a bit of a conundrum...
- KajMagnus 8y ago
  I built a Disqus like commenting system, where you can configure manual review of [the first X posts a new person posts at your blog]. If they write say 5 make-sense interesting things, hopefully thereafter it's ok to auto approve their subsequent posts. — How does this affect (if at all) how you feel about spam? (Here it is: https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments ) If you think someone might become a spammer, and is just posting "I like it" and "Wow great" comments to get past any first-comments manual reviews, then you can mark that user as a possible threat, and forever get notifieid about his/her posts (before they're made visible).
  - veddox 8y ago
    That looks good! However, I already had my sights set on Isso (https://posativ.org/isso/ https://posativ.org/isso/). My static site generator coleslaw (https://github.com/kingcons/coleslaw https://github.com/kingcons/coleslaw) already offers a plugin for this, so it is a more natural choice...
    - KajMagnus 8y ago
      Coleslaw seems to have many nice features. Hadn't heard about it before
- PuffinBlue 8y ago
  I'm not 100% sure. Before I turned of analytics I was getting somewhere between around 16k-20k uniques per month. I don't know the accuracy on that, one was Google analytics, one as server based but filtering out the bots, so perhaps caught a few blocking the trackers (like I do TBH). That was nearly 7 months ago I guess? Looking in Webmaster search console it says I had 15.5k clicks and 237k impressions last 28 days (compared to 17k/297k 7 months ago), so maybe there are less visitors now. Not sure. I might turn the analytics back on at some point to find out!

CM30 8y ago

Both? Most successful blogs and news sites I've seen tend to have multiple ways for their audience to contact them. Usually comments for posts plus accounts on various major social media sites and some sort of chat feature (for gaming sites nowadays it's often Discord, though it could be a forum, or Slack or IRC). Of course, you then have to strike a balance between getting setup on every platform under the sun (and spreading yourself too thin) or putting all your eggs in basket (and depending too heavily on traffic from a single source or platform). But yeah, there are usually multiple ways for people to contact successful blog authors.

darekkay 8y ago

I guess it mostly depends on your audience and traffic. I've blogged about different ways to handle user feedback [0] (in the context of static sites). If you don't like to self-host comments, there are many third-party or off-site alternatives. For a developer blog, you might even use something like GitHub issues. [0] https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/ https://darekkay.com/blog/static-site-comments/