The 42nd Estate

If you blog, you likely want comments on your posts, right? One of the great things about blogging, is that your readers can chime in with their opinion and either expand on your original article or show a different perspective on the topic. Even better, you want readers to come back and keep the discussion going and read your responses, right?

The overwhelming vast majority of you will respond, “heck yeah”!

So, please, for the sake of the number 42, install the Subscribe to Comments plugin on your wordpress blog.

Now!

New comment notification leads to more comments

There’s almost no argument against it. This simple plugin will allow WordPress to automatically notify commenters when a new comment is posted. If you use a third party commenting system (such as Disqus or Intense Debate), most of them already have this feature built in, but for the rest of you this simple plugin will increase comments, add depth to your discussions and keep people coming back for more. There’s almost no downside.

I did say almost no downside. If you get a rush of new comments and have a lot of people subscribed to those comments, there is potential for your email server to get overloaded. It is extremely rare and if you are getting that much traffic it might be time to upgrade to upgrade to a dedicated or virtual dedicated server.

When leaving comments on blogs that don’t have an option to subscribe to new comments (via e-mail) I’ll often leave a note telling them to install the plugins. It’s annoying leaving a great comment and having to refresh my browser to see if there’s a response. Often, I write the comment and forget it and the discussion dies.

Don’t let yourself fall victim to this one time comment discussion. We love the Subscribe to Comments plugin so much we use it on nearly all our sites and included it in our list of essential plugins for new wordpress blogs.

Tags: comments, plugin, wordpress

This entry was posted on Monday, June 8th, 2009 at 5:39 pm and is filed under Blogging Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.