I have a question for Media Nation readers. When I switched from WordPress.com to a hosted service a few months ago, I discovered that my posts no longer have “Leave a Comment” automatically embedded at the top. It’s part of the WordPress theme that I use, and there’s no fixing it short of switching to a different theme, which I don’t want to do, or delving into the code, which — uh, no.
As a result, I’ve been typing “Leave a Comment | Read Comments” at the bottom of each post when I publish it. Do you think it’s necessary, or is it’s so obvious that you can leave a comment that I can omit that step? I’d like to know what you think, so please comment on comments.
Leave a comment | Read comments
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I’d leave the Leave a Comment language, to help the clueless (ie me).
Hi Dan—
I’m OK with your comment note.
As an old journalism professor once said: “You tell them what you’re going to tell them. You tell them. Then you tell them what you told them.”
One sentence isn’t going to disrupt our universe.
I have to agree with Jeffrey Good: I’d keep the “Leave a comment” language intact.
Agnostic — although I’m leaving a comment here! I value the comments thread on this site, so I think I’m already conscious of the option without needing a reminder. Can’t speak for others.
Looks embedded to me.
I think it’s OK to remind readers to leave a comment if your theme does not allow it. I do that at YourArlington.
I’d keep it – to be honest, I’m thinking about adding that on my own blog!
Hey Dan. I like your note. I enjoy reading the comments without always leaving one. Thanks for asking my friend.
Hey, Dan. I think including the comment language is likely to do less harm than omitting it, so I’d include it. Cheers!
The “Leave a comment/Read comments” gives me a handy link from my aggregator to go directly to the comments section of posts I want to check back on. So I like it!
It can never hurt to remind people. Heck, look at me leaving a comment here for the first time.
I say leave the Comment/Read links — not necessary but nice to have.
Other than the leave/read comment line at the bottom of each post, I don’t see a way to comment on a post.
It’s obvious to leave a comment. No need to write leave a comment.
I read Media Nation in Safari on my phone. It presents as a list of entries, most recent at the top. Yes, if you click on the header of an entry, you get a new page with the whole entry plus comments and a place to add your own. But many entries are short enough that they fit intact in the list, so there is no reason to click on the header. If you remove the “Leave a Comment | Read Comments”, there won’t be any affordance to tell the reader how to access comments. Put another way, a reader who doesn’t think to click on an individual entry header will not see any way to access comments. I vote for keeping the links.
Keep writing it…
Too many will take it’s absence as meaning you either don’t want them or won’t get them…
Hah, and I thought that was part of this WordPress theme.
I was going to say, Nah you don’t need it people know you can click on the post title and get to comments — but given the comments above, I’m clearly wrong. So leaving it in makes the most sense.
FWIW, this is one of the reasons why I’m still using the now-ancient WordPress 2016 theme. Yes it looks outdated, but it retains all those functions that many of the newer themes seem to leave off. I feel a little better about it because Cory Doctorow, who’s a geek and a half, uses 2016 for his latest blog.