On Replying to Comments
The idea of this post came from Stephanie’s comment. I’ve always read on the WWW that it was good to reply to comments because it promotes conversations between the author and readers and encourages the readers to comment more often. Some people even took it another step farther to email the replies to their readers, which made sense to me. How else would the readers know that you’ve replied (unless of course, they’re constantly checking your blog)? I know that if I were the reader, I’d love to get an email reply back. It shows that the author cares, and that makes me feel warm and fuzzy. :3
I’m not saying that Stephanie meant anything by her comment, but it did get me thinking about the other side of this issue: What if some people didn’t want these email replies? They might consider it spam or an invasion of their privacy, I don’t know. But I do know that I don’t want to cause any unnecessary misunderstandings and problems because of something as harmless as an email reply.
My question for you guys (ok, so I ask a lot of questions, but I like to hear opinions, whether they agree with me or not) is: Would you want to receive email replies to your comments? Why or why not? I actually use a Grease Monkey (a Firefox plugin) script called Wordpress Ninja to reply to your comments, and it gives me the option to email the reply directly to you, post it as a reply comment, or do both. Usually I try to do both, but if your comment was something like “Nice layout! Great work!”, then I’d feel a little silly emailing you “Thanks.” :/ Also, um, I’m scared of emailing some people in case they go *wtfspamdeletesandblocks* on me, which would be the last thing I want.
Comments much loved and appreciated.
Tags: netiquette, survey, wordpress
September 25th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
I’m always looking for a WP plugin that will support threaded comments and email replies.. right now, mine sends an email notification but I want to disable it if the user doesn’t want it because I can imagine that’ll get pretty annoying since I tend to reply to a lot of my comments.
Does Grease Monkey support threaded comments as well?
September 25th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Heyy I remember you had a post about excluding paid posts from your main page? Do you still do that because I notice some of your posts popping up in my RSS feed. Which sites allow that? I need to get some extra money for a wedding in Cali in December so I’m thinking of taking up paid posts again.
September 25th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
@ Katy:
Unfortunately, Wordpress Ninja doesn’t support threaded comments. It just allows me to email + post a reply at the same time (or just do one or the other). I guess we’ll just have to wait till 2.7 comes out. :/
I’m so sorry about spamming the rss with paid posts! Apparently the code for excluding multiple categories from the feed is faulty, but I’ve fixed it now. Anyways, I use Payu2blog, PayPerPost, and SocialSpark, and I know that all 3 allows their posts to be excluded from feeds. However, the latter 2 won’t allow them to be excluded from the main page. Hope that helps!
September 25th, 2008 at 7:39 pm
Oh it’s okay… your not spamming! =)
How come those paid posts never showed up on your blog? I think I’ve done like 2 posts for PPP and made $40 in the last year.. can’t find any topics that I’d actually write about since I use to be largely against infiltrating my blogs with it but now I guess I need some extra cash!
September 25th, 2008 at 8:33 pm
I can’t believe you use a Firefox script for e-mailing comments. That’s kind of awesome.
Katy: There IS a new threaded comments plugin out there: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-thread-comment/ Maybe it works. Says it even sends an e-mail notification — who knows?
Mimi, it’s funny, this is almost a controversy around the Internet. Knitters like e-mailed replies to comments and eco-bloggers like to comment on their blogs so as to foster discussion. Of course, many of them use Blogger, which allows users to decide whether or not they want notification for comments.
There is a plugin for WordPress that does the same, actually.
Anyway. I don’t remember what people in this corner of the Internet do anymore, but personally I really like the choice to subscribe to comments or not. And I like e-mails too. I guess I’m a go-with-the-flow person.
September 25th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
@ Katy:
I excluded the category (basement) from showing up on my main page, my archives, and even my search results. However, they can still be accessed through the direct url. This only applies to posts from Payu2blog though. You can still find my PPP and SS posts on my main page (unfortunately).
Talk about extra cash! I think I’ve raked in a couple hundred writing these things! :O
September 25th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
@ Stephanie:
That’s what I thought when I found out too. Anyways, your comments always seem to inspire me to come up with new ideas. I used to have the subscribe to comments plugin, but it just notifies you when someone replies in general, and not to your comment.
So I’ve set up a little check box in the comment form that gives you the option of whether or not you want an email reply. Yay for less spammage! But I will still reply on the site, whether they like it or not. Nyahaha. >D
September 26th, 2008 at 6:35 am
Email replies would be a bit odd i think.. mostly because it would seem rather random. I suppose the notification type would be pretty good though and greasemonkey scripts are awesome. =)
September 26th, 2008 at 11:40 am
@ Lav:
Hmm, I guess it would seem random at first because the receiver might not remember about the comment. I’ve never tried other greasemonkey scripts; this wordpress comment ninja is my first one!