Why you would turn off comments

Just over a month ago I wrote a post that questioned why would you turn comments off?

The article was rather short, as I basically posed a question and then asked for responses. To quote me exactly I said

The real juicy content in this article will hopefully be in the comments!

Scroll down ↓

and so we scroll down… 😉

DiNaRa claimed that some bloggers may not no how to turn comments on. Fair point. Although if ever I don’t know how to do something blogging related, my first point of call is blogging forums and search engines, and usually I will have my answer in a matter of hours/days.
I see where you are coming from DiNaRa, but I do not promote lazy bloggers.

Raymund from Canon Toner said how he turns off comments only on pages, like the about page, the contact us page, the ‘advertise’ page, etc. He then went on to say that he would turn off comments on “any page that does not invite discussion” a fair point. We don’t allow comments on any of our pages. Why? Well they are part of the fixed structure of the blog. Got an issue with them? Use our contact form.
Raymund, I agree.


Joshua said how he would never turn of comments. Comments are vital, even if they are (as he puts it) ‘annoying’. He says how its our blog, and you can rule it how you like.
I agree with all that Joshua said, but if bloggers decide to ‘lock down’ comments, then they are unlikely to get many loyal readers.

Jakk from Technology Blogged mentioned how some sites turn of comments as they would rather people would interact via social media, partly as this requires a lot less management. He also said how “If you recieve over 1000 comments a day, and have limited resources, turning them off is the only thing you can do.” I disagree. Using multiple spam filters (like we do here) and having multiple comment moderators can easily solve this problem. Too much traffic? Don’t complain, put ads on your site, and use the revenue to pay for better hosting.
Jakk I see your point, but I disagree – again, I don’t promote lazy blogging.

Barbara used a great analogy: “Turning off comments in a blog is like refusing to speak to your partner in a real relationship. Who would do this?” apart from knowing a few people to whom this might actually apply, I think that it’s a great little quote.
I agree with you too Barbra.

Here are some more great responses:

Chadrack's response to 'Why would you turn off comments?'John's response to 'Why would you turn off comments?'Diana's response to 'Why would you turn off comments?'Thanks also to everyone else who left a comment, but wasn’t mentioned. There were loads of other great responses, so I urge you to go and check them out! Click to view the comments on ‘Why would you turn comments off?’.

So, do you agree with my opinion?

Did you miss the article and want to add your view now?

Comments are open to all, as usual 🙂

How is Technology Bloggers so successful?

A few weeks ago I wrote about what we as a community had achieved in the first two weeks of Technology Bloggers life. At the time it was stuff like 4 authors, 85 comments, bla bla bla…


At the bottom of the article I wrote

How on earth have we achieved this?

As a member of the admin team, I have done a few things which I believe have massively increased the traffic, encouraged people to comment, and attracted guest authors.

What are those things? Well, that’s another post! I hope to ‘revile all’ in the very near future, so stay tuned!

So now the time has come for me to reveal all! Well… all that I know 🙂

Technology Bloggers SuccessEvery Monday from now, I hope to start a whole series of articles, explaining in detail what I did and how that helped Technology Bloggers become so popular in such a short space of time.

The articles are going to based around these core points:

  • History and reputation
  • Promotion
  • Benefits – A two way system
  • Competition
  • Subscription options
  • Learn from the best

Interested in what I did to really kick this blog off? Stay tuned faithful readers and all will be made public very shortly!

Hopefully this can be a great way to brighten up your Monday mornings, with some great information which you could use to improve your own blog!

Be sure to tune in on Monday the 13th (two months after we launched) to find out how and why Technology Bloggers has been so successful!

How to show more screen options in WordPress

I have noticed that most of the other authors on this blog have failed to write a short excerpt for their article. It’s usually really easy and takes seconds to think of a short phrase to sum up, or entice people into reading your article.

When Marc (from the 360 Blog) wrote his most recent article, I emailed him to ask him why he never filled in the excerpt field, as he is now eligible to apply for author status, but that requires each article to have an excerpt.

Marc emailed back and told me

“You mentioned that you would like a short excerpt written, but there wasn’t a place to do that.”

Out came my thinking cap!

I then realised that when I had started Technology Bloggers, when creating a new post, the excerpt field wasn’t showing ether. The trackback field didn’t show, nor did the discussion field etc.


Do you have problems with

  • Excerpt field not showing when creating a new WordPress post
  • Trackback field not showing when creating a new WordPress post
  • Discussion field not showing when creating a new WordPress post
  • As well as other custom fields not showing

well if so I have your solution!

Screen Options.

The 'Screen Options' button in the WordPress admin consoleYou see at the top right of the admin console there is your name, log out etc. well just below that you should see a tab that says help, and next to that a tab that says ‘Screen Options’.

Click ‘Screen Options’ and it will pull the tab down to revile loads of new fields which you can choose to show or not.

The WordPress 'Screen Options' for creating a post in the admin consoleLike to work light? You may just want the publish box and the article writing area. Prefer to go into detail? Tick/check the ‘Categories’, ‘Post Tags’, ‘Custom Fields’, ‘Send Trackbacks’ etc. boxes for a more advanced view!


Under ‘Screen Options’ you also have the option or changing the screen layout. You can decide how many columns your dashboard uses, to display your selected widgets. On the homepage of the dashboard you can split it down in 1,2,3 or even 4 (if you have a very wide screen) columns. On posts pages you can choose to split the view down to two columns, or just the one.

Ever asked yourself ‘how can I show more comments in the WordPress admin console?’, if so, ‘Screen Options’ could help here too. Just click it and you can show as many or as few comments as you like. I have it set so that the WordPress comments page shows 50 comments per page, although I sometimes change it 🙂

Good luck bloggers with using WordPress the way you like it!