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> I am afraid of sharing though and getting negative feedback. Then don't. Don't add a comment section. Unless you have built an extensive community around you
by sph 3y ago
> I am afraid of sharing though and getting negative feedback.
Then don't. Don't add a comment section. Unless you have built an extensive community around your site, having open comments just invites drive-by criticism or generally people demanding, rather than stopping by to say nice things.
What I am thinking to add on my personal website, though, is a "send a reply" box at the end, where one can directly write to me, and I can respond via email. There is no promise of being published, which discourages spammers and drive-by snark, requires a valid email and promotes 1-on-1 communication which is much healthier and personal than the average Web 2.0 public comment widget.
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But, in general, do not write for an audience. Write for yourself. Write to get better at writing. Write because someone might find it useful, without having any engagement target. In that frame of mind, who cares if one doesn't like your content? The worst that'll happen is one will scroll by. They'll click the link, skim, and move onto the next shiny thing. We mindlessly and compulsively scroll down our social media apps until something piques our interest. This is the default mode of navigating the internet for most of us. If one stops by, spends time to comment on your post, it means they cared enough to.
- TrueGeek 3y ago> What I am thinking to add on my personal website, though, is a "send a reply" box at the end I just list my email address. FastMail's spam filters are good enough that I rarely get spam so it hasn't been a problem. Occasionally I'll get an email from a dev asking following up questions or if I can help them with their code. It's nice to know that it's not just my mom reading the site.
- reactordev 3y agoAnalytics could tell you that without exposing your email address to the world.
- TrueGeek 3y agoBut analytics wouldn't allow me to respond to the people asking for help. The site has been up for over 20 years, I think I added the email address about 10 years ago. If it was a mistake and would result in massive amounts of spam surely I would have felt the effects by now.
- throwup238 3y agoDid you obfuscate the email in any way or is it a mailto link?
- TrueGeek 3y agoNope, just a mailto: https://truegeek.com/contact https://truegeek.com/contact
- KomoD 3y agoCloudflare obfuscates it automatically, look at the raw HTML and you'll see that the mailto is replaced with a "/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" link, along with a email-decode.min.js script tag being added See: https://developers.cloudflare.com/waf/tools/scrape-shield/email-address-obfuscation/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/waf/tools/scrape-shield/em...
- TrueGeek 3y agoomg, all this time I've been giving FastMail the credit. What a nice little feature.
- reactordev 3y agolol, this reminded me why I tell devs that they should be the first to QA their stuff. So they can confirm intended behavior. Indeed it’s a cool feature from CloudFlare to obfuscate all mailto links. Now you know. I was a bit curious when you claimed FastMail has the best anti spam and you rarely get junk. Even with email mx verification and all, with a p2p spam list, and a fingerprint - I still get plenty of spam email or unwanted marketing spam.
- victorstanciu 3y ago> I just list my email address. That's what I did too. I added a mailto: link to the Hugo post template that also prefills the subject line with the title of the post when you click on it. The interactions I've had with this method feel much more meaningful to me than the average comment thread, for all the reasons @sph already mentioned.
- jaw 3y agoI do this too—every post has a footer telling people they can email me with feedback, along with a mailto link. I maybe see one piece of spam every few months because of it. And once in a while I get feedback that I really enjoy. As the top-level comment mentioned, there are advantages to 1-on-1 communication.
- derekzhouzhen 3y agoIf you don't want negative feedback, don't publish anything. You need the negative feedback; what you don't want is toxic feedback not aiming at you, but at other readers, and try to steal eyeballs for themselves.