a civil debate

It's true. Today I call for some civil debate. But don't worry. It's not about anything controversial. Well, scratch that. Maybe it's controversial. But it's not like...emotionally-charged, morally-driven debate. If this were Facebook, you wouldn't be feeling the need to hide me from your newsfeed. No one's gonna make any groan-inducing memes out of this topic. It's fairly inconsequential. But before we get to it, first I must share something else.

Last week on my earth-shattering revelation post about workout fashion Amanda S. left a comment that got me all puffed up with happiness and pride: she said that over the past few months, with all my talk about tri training and silly fitness blabber, I have inspired her to start running for the first time in years! She even compared me to a personal trainer!! And after I pulled myself off the floor and dried my laughter-sourced tears, I felt really happy because hey! I inspired someone to do something actually good! Normally I feel like my inspiration is limited to like...telling you about ridiculous TV shows and other such inconsequential things. But somehow the extremely un-athletic ME inspired someone to get fit! And so I was really excited. So I replied to her and we went back and forth, but then she sent me this email last night and people-- I died. So with Amanda's permission, please enjoy her detailed description of both the inspiration I provided AND way more importantly, her current workout fashion choices:

I'm sorry, but if you don't keel over with ridiculous laughter as you picture her in her 7th grade shetland sheepdog t-shirt, you're doing life wrong. That is amazing. I think I want to start my own What Not to Wear show focusing solely on workout fashion, and Amanda is going to be the subject of my first intervention. :) But at least she recognizes her questionable choices. That's like 80% of the battle, I think. But anyway. I did reply to her that I am now going to plan my own nation-wide tour of 5K races that have a shetland sheepdog t-shirt theme. I expect to see all of you there. 

Anyway. That was too funny to not share, so many thanks to Amanda for a) making those amazing fashion choices and b) letting me blab them to the whole interwebz.

And this is somewhat slightly related to my debate topic for today. Ready for it?

Blog Commenting: Pop-up Window versus Threaded Commenting.

If you're unsure what either of those things means, then please dash off and do some quick Googling before we proceed. Or just look at two examples (whom I did not ask for permission to use as examples, but I trust that they won't care): Allison uses pop-up window commenting. Kara uses threaded.

Up until yesterday afternoon, I've always used pop-up window. I've argued on behalf of pop-up. I've rolled my eyes, sighed heavily, and judged people for not using pop-up. And then yesterday I changed my own blog's commenting to threaded. Here's my issue/thinking.

I like the interaction that comes with commenting. Love it. I love how thoughtful and funny and amazing yall's comments are and I love the conversations they inspire. I try very hard to respond to most comments whenever possible and appropriate. And then sometimes you email back and the conversation continues and it's so much fun and I feel like I've built so many good friendships out of this back-and-forth exchange. 

But here's the thing. I respond to comments via the email notification I get. I do not spend all day staring at my own blog-- but I almost always have access to my email, so when I get a notification, I can easily hit 'reply' and respond, answer your questions, or whatever. But only if I know your email address. Otherwise you are what is known as a 'no-reply blogger.' I've ranted about this before-- please go here to find out more about this phenomenon and how to fix it. Hint: if you almost NEVER get email replies from other bloggers, this is most likely the reason why. Go investigate. Now, if I still really REALLY want to reply to you and I have the time, I might investigate further: if you have your own blog linked to your profile, I might go to your blog and hunt there for an email address (like on your Contact Me page). But if your email isn't easily locate-able on your blog (or you don't have a blog linked to your profile), then I'm pretty much stuck. And I'm sad! Especially if your comment was a question, or a good insight, or whatever...I feel bad that I can't respond! But oh well. 

SO: some bloggers choose to just respond back in the same comment section of their own blog. I get that. But here's the thing: I never, ever go back and re-read the comments on a blog I commented on. I comment on dozens of blogs every day. Don't nobody have time to go back to dozens of blogs and look at dozens of comment sections to see if people responded back in the comment section! If you respond to me and it doesn't get delivered to my email inbox, I'm never gonna know. And I assume most people are similar to me in that fashion. I would never expect you to come back to my blog AGAIN and re-read all the comments just to see if I might have answered a question there. That just seems weird to me. (But correct me if I'm wrong and people DO do that!) (Doo doo. Heh heh.)

So here's where threaded commenting comes in handy: If you enable threaded commenting, you can choose to be notified if someone (not just the blog author) responds to a comment you made. You better just go check out Kara's blog to see what I mean (well, you won't be able to see that these people are ALSO getting email notifications of responses to their comments, but they are). So when she responds to a commenter, a) they find out, b)it posts for everyone to see (so like, if she's answering a question that many people might be thinking, everyone sees the answer at once and doesn't have to keep wondering), c)commenters can interact with one another and ask each OTHER questions and be notified of it (versus being able to directly interact with ONLY the blog author), and d) the whole thing is way more fun. I love reading her blog and like 50% of the reason is that reading the comments is so much fun. I don't know how she finds so many funny people to comment, but dang-- it's just enjoyable. 

So yesterday, when I received a very kind comment and thoughtful question from a commenter, but was unable to find a way to respond, I got mad and changed to threaded commenting. Since I made the change after the fact (that is, after the person had written the comment), I have no idea whether it still notified her that I responded. But now I find myself pondering which way to leave the comments. There are pros and cons to each method.

Pros to Pop-Up Commenting:
-#1 pro is that you don't leave the page you were on-- comment box appears in a new window, you comment, close the window, and are exactly where you left off. This is really great if you're reading through a bunch of posts...you don't lose your spot! 
- I feel like it loads faster. You just load a tiny little box, not reload the whole page you were on.

Cons to Pop-Up:
-Not much interaction between commenters. Sometimes one of you will say 'like So and So said, I think _____' and So and So will never know that you agreed with her. Or if you have a question for why So and So thinks that, she'll never know you asked. 

Pros to Threaded Commenting:
-Basically the opposite of the Cons to Pop-Up. :) Interaction between all parties
-Can acknowledge/respond to people that don't have blogs/email addresses linked to their profiles

Cons to Threaded:
-MAJOR CON: Artificially inflates the comment count. It will count MY responses as 'comments' as well...so basically if 3 people comment and I respond to each comment in the thread, it looks like I got 6 comments. That's stupid. I didn't get 6 comments. And that would just really bother me.
-not sure about this one, but I think I would have to go TO my blog to respond in the thread? I could be wrong though (haven't tried yet)...maybe if I responded from my email, it would appear in the thread? Once yall start commenting today, I'm going to try both ways and see what happens. If I had to go back to the blog to comment, that would be a major con.

Okay. Sorry for all of the words today. Obviously I've been thinking about it a lot since changing it yesterday. What are your thoughts? Why do you have your comments threaded/pop-up? Which should I do? Will you race in my shetland sheepdog-themed 5K? Do you feel lied to if you see someone has 42 comments and then discover that 30 of them are actually their own? HELP ME PEOPLE.

PS. I have zero interest in installing Disqus or any other kind of third-party commenting system. Unless you have some life-shattering revelation about those things...I pretty much hate them and typically avoid leaving comments on blogs that use them because they annoy me so much. So there's that. (And if you have a blog that uses Disqus and I've commented on it...consider yourself very, very special.)