Last month I was reading through a series of very interesting articles about the decision to disable comments on a blog globally. Check ou this one if you want a quick overview on the matter, or this one if you want to see what the data says. I must admit I’m more inclined to keep comments active on this website, as I believe this is the kind of blog that would benefit from them, but I’ve decided to make a change on how long they actually stay open: after 180 days from the publication of a post they will automatically close.

Two things made me consider this choice. The first is that the topicality and the relevance of a post might diminish with time, so I think 180 days might be a reasonable time to wait for external contributions. Obviously some posts age better than others (for example, my post about Warhammer Fantasy 8th Edition could be a perpetual topic of discussion) but I reckon this is a long enough time for the vast majority of my content.

The second is that, in the recent months, this blog was literally bombarded by a quantity of spam of titanic proportions. So much that the numbers of spam comments on the akismet queue was doubling every month. This, of course, had an impact on website’s performance, forcing me to manually go and optimize the database. Since this change went live 10 days ago (more or less) I’ve received only a single spam comment.

Mission accomplished, I’d say. At least for now. :)