How do you deal with medical blog comments?

No Comments?

In No Comments Pushback, Russell Beattie writes why he stopped allowing readers to comment on on his blog:

The bottom line: "I’ve repeated from the very beginning in response to all sorts of criticism over the years, I will publish this weblog how I want, about what I want and you read if you want. That’s it, very simple."

Two years later, Russel turned on (and then turned off) comments once again: "The comments lately have been especially bad, so I just got rid of them all together... I mean, one moron recently suggested that I *delete* the post he was commenting on."

GruntDoc had a similar moment but then he switched the comments back on.

My Opinion

I regularly delete comments if I find them offensive to other readers or commercial rather informative in nature.

Most bloggers think of their blog as a personal space but at the same time, this space is available to the public and you want other people to visit it, right? Very few people write a blog only for themselves, admit it...

Two Schools of Thought

You have to strike the right balance between letting other people using your blog space and maintaining its original purpose.

Some bloggers, like Jacob of DocNotes, let comments stay in moderation for a while before they appear. This takes away the instant gratification of seeing your comment under the blog post and it reminds me of the journal peer review process. This is one approach and it's not bad.

Others, like Kevin, M.D., let pretty much any comments appear instantly which, I think, adds to the unique experience of reading Kevin's blog. He has short posts with a line or two of his personal opinion and 20-40 comments from different points of view (Note: Kevin has modified his blogging style since this post was originally published in 2006). The comments often dwarf the post but you get a fair idea of what the blogosphere thinks of a particular issue. See what Kevin has to say about the comments on his blog: A word on comments.

A NYTimes blogger writes about his virtual friendship (?) with a commenter on his blog:

There is a serial commenter on my blog and others at The New York Times, “Mark Klein, M.D.,” an older, accomplished gentleman with a lot of opinions and time on his hands. He can be a bit of a crank, politically incorrect to the point of provocation, and yet he always writes as though we are friends.

And maybe we are. A week ago, he posted a note saying that he was traveling to Israel and that I wasn’t to interpret his sudden silence as a sign that he’d lost interest in me. As if I cared.

Except that I did. I sort of missed him.

Conclusion

Feel free to comment. Comments are part of what makes blogs living organisms and we don't want to kill that, do we?

Consider adding a commenting policy to your blog and you can use mine as a draft:

Commenting policy

This web site has an open comment policy. All reader comments that are offensive to other readers will be deleted. Spam comments and those that are commercial rather informative in nature will be deleted.

Comments from Twitter

@SeattleMamaDoc: Rarely censor. Delete only if they are mean/off-topic/commercial

References

Comment Spam Discussed at Northern Voice. Scobleizer.
Guidelines for comments. Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO.
Dealing With Haters. YouTube Blog.
24-Hour Newspaper People. David Carr.
Bored with my blog. Russell Beattie’s Weblog, 04/2008.
The Day I Was Flamed At My Blog (And 7 Steps To Handle Flames With Grace). ProBlogger, 2010.

"Turning Off the Comment Demon" http://goo.gl/3ySR - Newspaper site requires credit card number to post a comment, no comments since then.

"Why did you turn your blog comments off?" (cartoon)
Image source: Wikipedia