Why no comment box?

3 February 2015

Previous incarnations of this website provided a facility for comments in the usual way for a weblog in the first decade of the 2000s—a comment form on each entry. This one doesn’t. Why not?

It’s simple. Comment forms are ugly. I don’t want to spend time moderating comments—wading through yet another medium that’s 90% spam is not a good way for me to use my time or energy. Publically available comment forms on the web are mostly buckets for spam and other detritus.

Most importantly, there are plenty of other ways you can comment on anything I do here.

• The best way is to reply to me on twitter. Use your favourite twitter client and post a link to news item you’re discussing.

  If you include the reference to my twitter handle @consequently, or if you simply link to a page on this site, I’ll see your reply when I check twitter. It’s really easy for me to include tweets in posts, like this one …

  All-star logic workshop in Banff, 2007 #TT http://t.co/0qBKXxfyyl pic.twitter.com/yMX8yHufgn

  — Richard Zach (@RrrichardZach) January 22, 2015

  … so if you’d like to comment, that’s a great way to get a short message out, in public.

• Or, if you’ve got something that’s longer than a tweet’s worth, write it, make it available on the web, and let me know. If I get useful feedback in public, I’ll try to link to it on the page, or point readers to it on twitter.

• Or you could always just send me an email.