Comments And Pings And Mentions, Oh My
This will be highly experimental and I reserve the right to retreat behind the wall again at any given moment and without notice, but I’ve begun preparatory work to open up all of comments, pings, and webmentions here beginning with the start of the new year.
My anxieties here are not merely technical, in terms of opening up vectors for abuse, but also: social in the sense of the ongoing tensions between writing for myself but also not really wanting to be talking to the void; and somewhat OCD in the sense that I’m almost inclined to publish a style guide for comments because I hate it when commenting ruins the “look and feel” of my blog.
At any rate, we’ll see how this goes, and it’s certainly, in a weird way, somewhat in line with having returned to the classic blog layout of content and sidebar.
For the moment I’m planning on having comments closed automatically on posts as they becomes older than 365 days, mostly because it’s a compromise between needing to make a decision on that score but also not needing to tie myself up in knots trying to make a choice that’s basically arbitrary and so I have no rules of thumb for it.
Technically speaking, these three means of interacting with the blog might be active under the hood at any given moment between now and the start of the new year, but any visible components will be hidden via CSS. That does mean that pings and webmentions could be accessible prior to then.
Anyway, as I said at the outset, and like pretty much all of blogging if you really think about it, this very much is an experiment, and since I simply don’t know how it’s going to make me feel I can’t give anyone else any sense of what to expect. It is what it is, and will be what it will be, or it won’t.
Addenda
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There’s one other, more complicated thing to decide. Some of the older blogs that will make their way here during the restoration project had comments and pings turned on. If I switch to directly importing archive files and then doing some clean-up afterward, rather than manually adding posts as I’ve been doing, I’d have the option of also importing all those old comments as well. I’m not sure how I feel about this either way.
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It’s also worth mentioning that I’ve been having some database crashes of late, and turning on comments, pings, and mentions might make this worse. Earlier today I activated a swap file on the VPS, and I’ll be monitoring its usage.