Structure for Comments // Telekinetic Marketing

Dan C. Rinnert
814 days ago

What is your preferred method for structuring the comments on your blog?

The typical means is to show the oldest at the top and the newest at the bottom and with or without threading and nesting.

With that method, the strategy for blog commenters is to be among the first to leave a comment so that their link gets seen. Even if you disregard (and delete) the comment spammers, do you think such a system tends to discourage new comments after the quantity of comments has reached a certain point? Will people think that they will go unnoticed if their comment is at the very bottom of a long list? Thus, might they choose instead to not leave a comment and try to be among the first on your next thread?

I'm curious as to whether anyone has tried the other approach, where the newest is on top rather than on the bottom. Does that encourage participation more? Each time you visit the page, you're more likely to see something new that way and perhaps be enticed to leave yet another comment.

On the downside, would that invite more spammers? After all, instead of being first, they just need to have the most recent comment. The other downside is that I think we are used to seeing the newest information last. That's not always the case. A blog, for example, has the most recent information first, but then, when you get to the comments, the most recent comment will be last. The difference, of course, is that the comments tend to become a conversation whereas the post is just the opening speech--a monologue, if you will.

Anyway, those are the thoughts going through my head at the moment, and I am curious as to whether anyone has tested the latter approach and, if so, what the results were.

nRehman

nRehman
814 days ago

It seem to be a nice strategy that can create a competitive atmosphere in getting more valued comments and as you know in relation to a new customer a repeat customer shows how popular and successful we are and this is a dual way of getting benefit and knowledge where one gives us quality comment and other will tell us how successful is our posting that bring back to us a person again to post comment to stay up in the row.. On the other hand it will bring more Spam but it’s not a big issue because we have become use to it..

Tina Golden

Tina Golden
813 days ago

I think if you are going to encourage comments, the whole point would be to bring a more social feel to the blog. If you plan on responding to comments and hopefully encouraging interaction between readers, I think it needs to be in linear order from oldest to newest.

GT

GT
812 days ago

I agree that comments on blogs should be from oldest to newest. It is more natural to read them in that order to get a sense of the discussion. Not all commenters read the previous comments and write related comments, but some do, and going from oldest to newest makes it easy to breeze through.

If comment discussion takes a life of it's own, all the better (especially if it is relative to the blog post, but it's still good if it diverges). The point is, if people engage in the discussion, they are motivated to return and see how others have responded to their comments. And that is the aim - to get visitors to return to the site.

Dan C. Rinnert

Dan C. Rinnert
811 days ago

Thanks for the feedback everyone!

Another option, where possible, would be to give the user a choice. Default could be oldest to newest, but you could have a user option where they could set it to display from newest to oldest. That way, they can choose the method that works best for them.

Aimee Vo

Aimee Vo
807 days ago

Hey Dan,

How about stripping the date out of the post - these days bloggers who have evergreen information tend to strip out the date so that it doesn't give the blog that old feel.

If you want to remove date from appearing on your blog posts, just delete the following snippet of codes from the /wp-content/themes/index.php page.

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<div class="date">
<p><?php the_time('F j, Y'); ?></p>
</div>

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