Follow me on twitter
Facebook
Blogging and dealing with too many comments
August 23rd, 2008Here’s a problem I know some people would like to have to handle, because having too many comments on a post also usually means your blog is popular. It’s nice to have a popular blog with popular articles and people commenting a lot, but trust me it can become a huge problem.
I recently had to face that situation:
It’s a huge load of comments to handle and while it’s fun to know people like what you write, it’s a pain for first time visitors. First time visitors comming from Google have to wait for the page to load and it’s a pain. Not only the visitors have to wait, but with a 1Mb page it hurts the bandwith a lot!
How to handle it?
The solution is the Wordpress paged comments plugin. This little plugin allows you to have paged comments on your blog instead of having a single page with hundreds of comments. You can decide how many comments you want per page, how to order the comments, etc. There’s even a CSS sheet included with the plugin that you can modify to fit your template. I decided to display only 25 comments per page and the article went from 1Mb to 80kb. Quite an interesting improvement for the bandwidth and also for the poor users!
So there you go, now you can handle the popularity of your blog. I hope you will face that problem! 
16 Responses to “Blogging and dealing with too many comments”
What do you think?
Subscribe : A new sketch every morning
Receive this blog in your inbox by entering your email address:
That’s it. I really need to upgrade to Wordpress and get my own domain one of these days. All of these dandy plug-ins you mentioned won’t work on sad ol’ Blogspot…
The Hawgs last blog post..The Hawg goes international!
Good for bandwidth but bad for reading.
I am mostly skipping even articles split in pages (unless there is “print this page” hack on site)… I almost never look at paged comments. With articles I at least what’s it about and is it worth opening five pages instead of one, with comments I don’t.
But I hope to face problem on my blog too.
Rarsts last blog post..Handling stream of online information
I would say good and bad as what mentioned by Rarst… I would normally read everything on the first page and then would be too lazy to click to another page… but then, too many comments on a page my not get fully loaded on some slow connections…. it’s a tough decision for a popular blog such as yours
shaxxs last blog post..New Theme
As usual your post is a good one. I do not have this problem as yet but hope I do in the near future.
Caroles last blog post..Chicken Breed Series #4–Silkies
I hear you all, I know it’s very bad for reading, but there are a couple of things that can be done so it doesn’t get that bad. I’m thinking about displaying 100 comments per page instead of 25 and there is an option that lets you show all the comments if you feel like loading 750 comments! Also, I will post a part II to this article with another interesting solution
Well that’s a very interesting problem to have!! LOL! I havn’t run across that problem but thanks for sharing! Now I know what to do if I do run into that problem!
reginas last blog post..Old School Friday # 27 – Crooners!
Hehe no problems!
Good stuff man..though I don’t have 700+ comments, it’s good to have this feature.
JK Swopess last blog post..24 Hour Site Flipping Contest. Crackhead Style.
Awesome “problem” to have and definitely a good suggestion for how to deal with it
When i reach the high mark , I ll install this plugin , I ve bookmarked your post…thanks for this Ben
This sounds like a good plugin however, I do wonder how that would affect the amount of comments, since after x amount of comments are shown the others are put on different pages, how commenters would feel about their comment ending up on page 2 or even 4.
Work At Home Mom Taras last blog post..Social Networks..How many are nessary?
i’m sure this would be a great help for me when i will became as popular as SEohorror. how about the blogger, do they have alternative plugins to lessen the load of the page?
jigss last blog post..Pakapin sa Bobot
I dont think anyone would mind sorting a lot of comments on his blog
…the plugin seem good , I dont remember seeing this plugin on any blog. Thanks for the infor , more posts on good plugin would be appreciated
I dont think anyone would mind sorting a lot of comments on his blog
…the plugin seem good , I dont remember seeing this plugin on any blog. Thanks for the info , more posts on good plugin would be appreciated
zks last blog post..Dot Com Pho with John Chow and Toronto Bloggers
Darn, that’s a lot of comments! Wish I had this problem@!
I think I’ll give a try to this plugin……though not getting that much commnetss….but still it looks gr8
SEO forumss last blog post..List of do-follow blogs to boost your Google Pagerank.