Famous for the wrong reasons
The top three articles on Aquarionics are.
For amount of wuffie generated: ESF
For amount of Google hits: How to convert AMR to MP3
But for shear amount of comments, draining of my faith in human kind, and horror value:
It’s not an amazingly written article. It’s not even that funny. But it did something quite neat at the time, and became the number three result for “failed driving test” in Google in the UK.
And the first that allowed comments.
Now, for a second, go and read that thread. Catch up on FIVE YEARS of people wondering why only running over a pedestrian a little bit counts as a fail.
Yesterday, I implemented the ability to shut off comments on arbitrary posts. So.
What little of my readership remains: Should I disable comments on that article?
Hmm, arbitrary comments on an ancient post by drive-by readers. Why bother running the rest of the site – you could devout your life to running a forum all about funny “How I Failed my Driving Test” stories.
…Or you could disable comments on that post.
I’m torn. On the one hand it’s dubious whether it’s bringing any value to Aquarionics, other than the perpetual ability to marvel at the sheer number of like-minded (ahem) people who have been brought together by your driving test. Plus for anyone who subscribes to your comments feed it’s just adding noise.
On the other hand, it made a very nice test case for my third-year project RSS reader (see http://www.ephemeraproject.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/aqdriving.png and http://www.ephemeraproject.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/junk.png), (sheesh, those URLs are long. I forgot you didn’t allow HTML) so on that basis I’m inclined to say “Keep them coming!”
On the third hand, since my project report is due in two and a half days (panic), it’s immaterial…
I, personally, wouldn’t. I’ve shut off comments on a few of my older posts, but mainly things where the comments were *bad* — for example, my “how to be rich and famous” one, which got lots of people posting their phone numbers in a (vain) hope that they’d be seen by talent agents, or the Carphone Warehouse one where the comments were downright libellous, or the cat death one where people were looking for help and consolation after their cat died (and there are better fora for that). If the comments aren’t bad in any way, I’d leave it up; not doing you any harm. On the other hand, you’re under no obligation to provide a free discussion forum for these people, so shutting it off is in no way an unreasonable thing to do.
I love that thread!
If it was one of my threads I wouldn’t shut the comments off. My only reason for turning off comments is if the non-spam comments have stopped and the spam remains. Comments posted by a person, however mindless, remain unless they’re blatantly spam. I broke this rule only once, for a comment posted by a friend of mine who was trying to test my tolerance.