Multithreaded

Joel Spolsky makes this insightful, erm, comment on allowing comments to blog posts or not. I have to say, I have a lot of sympathy for his view, where he is in agreement with Dave Winer, of not allowing comments to blog posts.

It is interesting for me that on this blog (not the most popular or active in the world, for sure) one of the most popular posts has been my rant against Orange for their disgusting broadband service. To date there have been 104 comments from similarly frustrated and dissatisfied Orange customers and it has become something of a forum for people to not just express their emotions on the issue, but to keep people informed of the progress they are making in the fight against a totally broken customer service situation, and, in some cases, to announce their final victory.

However, this kind of post may be unusual in its nature. Joel and Dave make the point that their blogs are where they can express their, possibly unpopular, ideas and if anyone wants to comment on them they should do so in their own public forum (i.e. blog) and not as a comment (possibly anonymous). Joel also makes the good point that comment threads often rapidly descend into bun fights, especially for just those controversial issues that he feels blogs are best suited to and the trackbacks should ensure that all the posts are linked together.

So, with that in mind, I have disallowed comments on this post. If anyone is actually reading it, and wants to comment, you know where and how to do it.