Wordpress Email Comments Subscrption Plugin
January 31st, 2007 by Michael Gray in SEOIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
Lately I’ve gotten a few requests to install the email comments subscrption plugin. I’m a little hesitant to install it and I’ll tell you why.
Firstly I have to say unless it’s important I hate email. Email is an interruptive technology. Instead I subscribe to comments via co.mments and plug it into my RSS reader. This way I can pull them in and read them when it’s convienient for me and not be interrupted every five minutes with “me too” sillyness. I can even read the comments without going back to the blog. It works perfectly everywhere except SEOMoz (nudge nudge). However I understand that just because my preference is for RSS over email it’s not everyone elses, some people actually prefer email, go figure.
My second reservation is some knucklehead will subscribe forget they did and then report it as spam, and a cascading failure of badness will rain down on my poor defenseless blog. I’ve seen it happen. Although I think the default email address for the blog is a gmail account (it’s set up that way for automatic nightly backups) so might be funny to see if google gets into trouble.
However if enough people think it’s a feature they would like added I will consider it on a temporary trial basis (is my bias obvious). So if it’s something you want/don’t want let me know. If it’s something you tried on your blog let me know good or bad. Lastly for you folks who are already using it, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE turn off the default setting that checks the subscribe button, it’s really annoying.
Sphere It
February 2nd, 2007 at 3:47 am
The spam thing was also brought up by Andy Beal when I asked about Email notification.
I use both, RSS and Email and both are crowded. People have different preferences. Offering the most common and not just your personal favorite allows for smoother discussions and more “natural” conversations.
I hope comments for this post are still intact. I thought it was a rich discussion and sent a link to several people and linked to it multiple times too.
http://www.wolf-howl.com/seo/googles-policy-on-no-follow-and-reviews-is-hypocritical-and-wrong/
February 2nd, 2007 at 5:44 am
I wrote this the other day, but I guess the server problems ate it?
I suggested that you could point people at rss to email conversion services
Googling for
rss to email services
gives some results
This would mean the results weren’t from your domain and you wouldn’t have yet another plugin to manage
HIH
September 4th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
I can certainly understand your reservations about providing the email plugin for your comments. But it has a distinct advantage to the visitors of your site that RSS may not provide. Let’s say a visitor stumbles upon your blog because of an interesting conversation going on in post. He may want to be put in the loop without having to be bothered by other entries/new posts on your blog. Then the email subscription would be a cool idea. I am not sure if RSS readers can actually be configured just to pull one particular post or category. I am guessing they should be able to do that, but I still prefer an email in my mailbox.