Most of us who blog really love to see genuine conversations taking place on our blogs. We want our readers encouraging one another, pushing back on each others’ ideas, and poking holes in assumptions.
For that to happen, though, readers have to return to a blog post repeatedly to respond to other comments. The problem is that even if we post a comment to a blog, most of us forget to return and check to see if others have replied to our comment.
There’s one tiny little feature that can be a huge help…
That’s the ability to subscribe to receive email notifications when someone else has replied to our comment or posted another comment.
Here on CWT you’ll notice down where you post a comment, you have the ability to “Subscribe to” either “Replies” or “All new comments.” That’s courtesy of the IntenseDebate commenting plugin.
If you don’t give commenters an option like that on your blog, you are severely limiting the conversations that will happen in the comments of you post. It’s a big enough deal, that I would recommend against using any blogging platform that doesn’t have this option.
How big a deal is the “subscribe to comments” option to you on the blogs you read?
Does your blog have a “subscribe to comments” option? Is it a native part of your blogging platform or did you add it using a plugin?
2 Comments
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I rarely leave a comment and NOT subscribe. When I decide to not subscribe it may be for the reason of not wanting an expected 50 email messages that day. Or, I might have had problems with that subscriber-component in the past. Being not native to the cyber-world (meaning I did not grow-up in it) I am a bit slower to shift newborn habits in that world. So, I will take a chance and subscribe to this post despite the fact that intensedebate has caused me stress in the past. 😉