Blogging Chat: Do You Ever Turn Off Comments?

Comments can be a great thing about blogging, but they can also be a source of stress. In this week’s blogging chat, I wanted to talk about whether people ever choose to turn off comments on their blogs.

First off, if you want to turn off comments on individual posts, that’s in the post settings down at the bottom section called Discussion, and there’s a tick box to allow comments. To change the settings for your whole site, go to My Sites > Settings > Discussion and turn off “Allow people to post comments on new articles”.

I’ve never contemplated turning off comments for my site; I think if it was bugging me that much I’d probably just take a blogging break. There’s been the odd time where I haven’t allowed comments on individual posts, mostly when I expect that I would get sympathetic comments and I feel like that would annoy me. When I just don’t have the brainpower to answer comments, I’m usually still okay with getting them, and I just respond with emojis rather than words.

When bloggers I know stop allowing comments, I don’t have any issue with that (a couple of them did recently, which inspired this post); however, I think if I was deciding whether or not to follow a new blog, I’d probably be less likely to start following a blog with all comments turned off. I think the issue there is that comments are a way to get to know a blogger better, and if I already feel like I know someone reasonably well, whether I can comment or not on individual posts is no big deal.

So now it’s over to you. Do you ever turn off comments, either on individual posts or your entire site? And how do you react if you come across someone else’s blog that has comments turned off?