Blog comments, a must-have or fun extra?

I’m participating in Blaugust this month and one of the recurring discussions that has risen this year again is whether a blog needs to have a comment section to be considered a blog. There’s been a lot of discussion in the blogosphere and even more in our Discord server and the discussion has spanned across many aspects. Originally, I took part in the discussion in Discord only as that’s been a discussion I haven’t seen anywhere else. But eventually, I also wanted to bring in my thoughts into the public, hence, you’re reading this.

Let’s start with what other Blaugustians have written in the past week or so that started this discussion.

I think it was Naithin’s post The Paved Paradise and Put Up a Static Site that sparked the discussion. Naithin wrote about the trend of minimalistic websites and contributed lack of comments at least partially to that

Minimalist blogging is seemingly the ‘in’ thing right now — and fair enough, I guess. Sites like Bear Blog, 11ty, and other static-site generators have a lot going for them. They’re fast, clean, clutter-free. A reader’s dream… until you try to actually do something with the content. Like, say, reply. Or react. Or even just drop a “hey, this really resonated — thanks.”

and

Whatever it is you might feel you’re gaining in a switch to minimalism, you’re paying for in community interaction.

Once I had read this post, another post on the topic was lined up in my RSS reader, this time from Bhagpuss titled I Couldn’t Possibly Comment. Bhagpuss also talks about the minimalism and says

More of the minimalist blogs prefer to offer some means of leaving feedback, just not on the blog itself, which must remain pristine. If you have thoughts or questions or wish to make a comment, you're invited to send an email or to visit the author's preferred social media platform and interact with them there.

Personally, I’ve never had that idea in my mind when I’ve decided whether my blog has commenting available or not. I’ll go more into detail of many other reasons later in the post.

What got my blood boiling a bit and ushered me into the discussion was this:

I said [- -] that static site blogs aren't a good fit for Blaugust but I think what that really means is that Blaugust might need some clearer definitions of what it is and what it's aiming to achieve.

As someone who loves static sites and the benefits they offer compared to using things like WordPress or publishing on someone else’s platform, I took this rather personally.

In a follow-up post, Naithin continued the discussion and quoted the same thing I quoted above about static sites not being a good fit in Blaugust with a reply of “Which is, at some level, probably fair.”

At this point, we had a lot of discussion in Discord and I feel like we got closer to each other and understood better where different people were coming from.

The discussion continued in the blogosphere with axxuy, Sam, jackalope talk, Contains Moderate Peril and Wilhelm Arcturus all sharing their thoughts on the topic.

My initial reaction to this discussion was that I felt it was gatekeeping blogging from people based on a single feature that some commenters felt was important to their idea of blogging.

Why my blog doesn’t (kinda) have comments?

First of all, I love comments. I’m all for having discussions and I felt none of the reasons other people listed really resonated with why I don’t have comments.

I say “kinda” because even though I have a makeshift comments system through Mastodon, I don’t think it really fills the checkboxes for a good comments system. Mainly because it requires the reader to have an account in specific system, in this case Fediverse, to participate and I don’t like when that happens. Similarly, when other people’s blogs have requirement to create an account — whether it’s to WordPress or Disqus or GitHub or something else — I tend not to bother. So my solution is a non-satisfactory (to me) hack.

Technical reasons

For me, the real reason is technical. A static site makes adding satisfactory comments challenging. Not impossible but so far, all of the systems I’ve seen don’t meet my requirements. I don’t want to add third-party systems that track or collect data or save the comments somewhere in their servers. My Mastodon integration is partly that but the comments live their own life outside my blog and they are posted within that system so it’s different from something like Disqus.

Comments need to be stored somewhere. A static site is just a collection of HTML, CSS and client-side Javascript — or like Zach says, a folder of files. There’s no backend or database to handle and store comments.

Crucially, that means the site is technically way less complex than platforms like WordPress that are dynamic: each time a user opens a blog post, PHP does its thing to run WordPress and a database is accessed to render the post and possible comments. And there’s usually a bunch of WordPress plugins that add their own complexity.

Complexity means there’s more that can go wrong and require more technical work from the site author to fix. A database can corrupt or crash, PHP (or WordPress or any of the plugins) may have encounter bugs that prevent the user from reading your site.

If your hosting has problems, moving a full WordPress site to a new host requires way more work than moving a static site. If my hosting would disappear, all I’d have to do is point my domain and GitHub integration into a new host and site would be up and running immediately.

The deployed and rendered HTML site is also on itself a full back up. All the content is there. There’s nothing that needs backing up from databases.

I’ve had my fair share of maintaining WordPress sites, keeping plugins up to date and managing issues that I don’t want to do any of that if I can choose. I’m willing to sacrifice a comment section for simplicity in maintenance.

Static sites also have way less performance issues as loading static HTML is fast compared to anything that needs to take a round trip to the database on every request. Possibly even multiple trips if loads the post and comments separately.

Spam reasons

I’m not so much worried about people’s opinions on my posts. I publish my blog posts for the public to read and comment in other places. I end up having discussions about my blog posts with people in Mastodon, Discord and Slack communities, via email and through blog posts other people write on their blogs and link to mine. Occasionally, people share my posts on sites like Hacker News (the orange site) or Lobste.rs and then I try to avoid reading the comments, usually fail and end up participating in the discussion.

However, I do not want to manage the spam, scam and bots that are active in unrestricted comment sections. I also don’t want to moderate every single reply before they are shown on the site because that would slow down the discussion and put a burden on me to keep my eye constantly on the comments admin panel and accept things.

I’ve ran blogs and discussion forums as part of my job and the most dreaded part was maintaining the comments so that only real comments would make it through.

Financial reasons

Hosting a static site is also often cheaper and there are more options to choose from. Pretty much any web hosting company can host my website very cheaply. If I need for example PHP and database (for WordPress), the requirements grow, the processing power needed grows (not a lot but a non-zero amount) and that often means things get more expensive.

Static sites also scale better so a big spike of readership doesn’t rack up as much of extra bill as it might for a more dynamic solution.

Legal reasons

This is not a concern for me at the moment but in many jurisdictions, website owners can be liable for all content published on the blog and thus, allowing anonymous comments introduces potential legal issues. Often these legal cases are ones you don’t want to be on the side of being sued or fined.

In that regard, I consider somehow excluding non-comment blogs from the category of blogs is short-sighted and gatekeeping for such small thing.

There are many ways to have a discussion

Even if none of the above reasons apply, the decision whether to accept comments or not should be 100% in the hands of the blogger and they should still be considered equally valid blogs than those that do.

Bloggers already have an amazing tool on their hands to comment on someone’s post: their own blog. I think writing a reply post and linking to the original is even better option than comments. It spreads the discussion to new audiences, allow more flexibility in what you can share (like pictures, videos, links to other things etc that are often not allowed either for technical or content reasons in many blogs).

If someone writes a blog post as a reply to mine and lets me know, you can be sure that I’ll link back to it so others can read it as well.

If an author, like I do, asks people to reach out via other methods like email or social media, that opens up the avenue for discussion. In the blog posts I linked in the beginning, this was seen as not a solution due to either it feeling weird to email a stranger or taking the discussion to private compared to public (which I agree on but good arguments or examples can often be brought back into the blog, if the other person consents to it — I’ve done that multiple times).

Finally, I want to say that if you only want to read blogs that have a comments section or only participate in discussions with those, that’s perfectly fine. Everyone is free to make their own decisions on what and who they want to interact with.

But if someone questions the validity of a blog as a blog if it doesn’t have comments or feels like blogs published on static sites is bad, I do have opinions on that.

More discussion

• Blaugust 2025: No Comment(s) by Nik
• Creating Positive Community Takes Effort by Crimson