Illinois Real Estate Blog Commenting

Today, I decided to reverse a decision I made years ago and allow comments on my Illinois real estate news blog. When I created this blog back something like 5 years ago, I initially encouraged comments from visitors. I was very much into the Web 2.0 concept of providing a user-oriented site with ways for visitors to interact with content. What resulted was perhaps 2 years of dozens of daily spam comments from bots and other garbage that I didn’t want on my site. I think I ended up approving 1 comment and deleting several thousand. Based on this experience, I closed down comments on all of my blogs and blog posts. This had the unfortunate side effect of really limiting the community involvement of my site.

Based on this, you might wonder why I’m now enabling comments again. First, I am doing this on a trial basis. If I don’t get any community involvement and just get a bunch of spammy comment garbage and bots, I will once again clamp down. However, I really do want to foster discussion on my blog. I participate in several other communities of real estate bloggers with often lively discussions and I have the desire to foster the same types of discussion here. Second, there are some much more useful tools that have been developed to combat comment spam. Askimet and similar spam captcha programs has made me want to try again.