To default check or not email notification? |
Loading ...Personally, I’m not fond of having to uncheck items (default checked items) however I will admit when leaving comments on blog entries around the web it can be handy to get an email notification automatically when future comments are left after mine.
I noticed when running the previous script here that several people leaving comments chose to be notified. This is a win-win for the site (return visitors) and for users if they like this function, but it’s an extra click for those who don’t want to get email when it is default checked.
This is where I’d like your help if you have a few seconds.
I’ve just added and enabled Jennifer’s WP Subscribe to Comments plugin and made the default be to automatically send email notification. If you are a reader who leaves comments on this blog and do not or do like this box being checked by default then please speak up in the comments section and let me know.
BTW, I didn’t bring back the CAPTCHA (yet) as I received some feedback that not only was this not accessible for disabled people, it was a PITA for other. This may still come back if the spam becomes a problem, but we’ll wait and see on this one. If this is your first ever comment on this blog than it is held in moderation, after that your comments will passthru without delay.
Thank you for reading.
I says default!
Comment by Marcus — March 15, 2005 @ 8:16 am PST
Let’s see if you get an email when I reply then
Comment by TDavid — March 15, 2005 @ 9:15 am PST
If you have it on by default it will only be a matter of time when someone reports you for spam. I see it happen all the time. If you give the reader the option of subscribing to the posts he/she wants to be notified on (and of course the option to opt out) you will have a smoother ride.
I would also move it to the top of the comment box instead of underneath it. The way I have my browser window set I didn’t see it under the comment button. If it hadn’t been for this post stating you installed it, I wouldn’t have looked for it.
Comment by Tyme — March 15, 2005 @ 9:16 am PST
Good suggestion Tyme on moving the checkbox up, and I did move it up a little bit. I put it above the submit button, not above the textarea box.
I also added a couple sentences on our comment philosophy. We like to receive comments, even when people disagree and correct us, because the majority of what is shared here is rough draft material and could stand to be under at least some scrutiny. Also, we don’t have a problem with giving the commenter’s blog/website some SE juice.
In fact, in exchange for their time leaving a comment, I think that’s a fair exchange. It’s a shame we had to mod Wordpress 1.5 in order to make this change. This tells me that there are a lot of new Wordpress 1.5 blogs out there that are putting nofollow on links by default. It should have been an option in the admin area to disable/enable that. It’s wrong for the vendor to put that in by default, IMO, with no way to uncheck a box or something to turn off.
And time is money. Others seem to think commenters/readers are owed nothing, which when I encounter this perspective I find it somewhat disturbing. Especially in light of the fact that many people are paid hourly for their time and that there is only so much time in our lives.
Ok, so maybe I’m starting to sound pretty dramatic here, but that’s the way I truly feel.
So if someone takes time to give their honest opinion — not spam or mindless unrelated banter, of course, but an honest, relevant opinion — on anything than that’s worth something IMO. A link with the nofollow attribute assigned to it just seems like a slap in the face to me for participating in a discussion. Nobody yet has been able to convince me otherwise.
Obviously, others out there disagree and think this nofollow is a great idea.
As for spam? I’ve found in those extremely rare cases where we’ve received a spam complaint (it has been associated with our double opt-in student newsletter at our scriptschool site and not ever over a forum, blog, etc system generated responder email) when you personally respond to those type complaints and show the person complaining (er, remind them in most cases) what they did (along with providing their IP and other details) to generate the email and of their specific consent as well as remove them so they receive no more email, than that takes care of it with all concerned parties.
Spam to me isn’t a response from a messageboard or forum I interacted at that I asked to receive; and yes, whether we like it or not, when we hit “submit” we are consenting to the form that is being submitting which includes the boxes being checked. It’s a simple mouse click to turn it off. Although I will admit that in the haste to leave a quick comment forgetting to uncheck that box could be a real issue.
We’ve come full circle.
Our plan (subject to change based on reader feedback) is to leave this default checked for at least a month and see what feedback comes in. My preference is to ultimately go back to the way it has been for a long time: unchecked by default, but since change is the theme here recently, why not experiment with a few other changes?
Just so people don’t get too lathered up, though, this ultimately is just an experiment and thus very subject to change.
Comment by TDavid — March 15, 2005 @ 10:52 am PST
[…]
Always opt in for email notifications
March 15 2005
TDavid asks a question on his blog: To default check […]
Pingback by BlogTyme » Always opt in for email notifications — March 15, 2005 @ 11:05 am PST
You were typing as I was typing! I made a post about it on my site because it’s something that comes up all the time. As I mentioned I have a client who did the same thing and his site is gone.
Although I strongly advise not doing so it’s your site and you have all the right in the world to take risks with it.
Good luck!
Comment by Tyme — March 15, 2005 @ 11:06 am PST
Tyme - I just left comments for you over there. Where are you drawing that I’m giving anybody “advice” for anything out of this experiment?
I am simply running an experiment, one of which I’d be happy to invite the owner of the hosting company I’ve done business with since 1999 to see what I’m doing here and get his opinion. I suspect that he knows by now that I would never, never, never do anything to endanger his clients or my own domains personally or professionally.
So the “taking risks” is a big stretch here, Tyme. Now I think it’s you over-dramatizing what I’m trying to do by simply getting feedback. I do appreciate your point of view, but let’s be careful about how we depict the actual events and make sure that you don’t cross over into my area of business which I take extremely seriously.
There’s personal and there’s professional and when you start throwing around the word “advice” attached to my name, then please be damned sure that I actually am advising someone. In this case, nothing could be further from reality.
In an odd sort of way, I would say we both agree more than disagree — except in the fact that you don’t seem to feel I should run a test like this at all because it puts our domain, our hosting company, etc at some sort of risk. That’s interesting, but I don’t think it’s accurate.
Ever installed Real player? They have default checked just about everything! I hate that it’s that way, but that’s the way it is. They still seem to have hosting.
Comment by TDavid — March 15, 2005 @ 11:29 am PST
I like the idea. When you read or post to many sites, it can be a pain to recall where you may or may not have left a comment etc. I have forgotten about many a posts I have made.
Comment by ^Lestat — March 15, 2005 @ 11:47 am PST
In your situation TDavid this is a good experiment to run. I do see where others who may not have as much expertise or control over their hosting wouldn’t want to risk getting reported for spam. What I haven’t discovered is if you can customize the email and what you have done to customize it so it doesn’t get easily reported as spam.
Comment by FranciscoIV — March 15, 2005 @ 11:58 am PST
You’re missing the point of my post. In many cases the blogger doesn’t have the option to test because it’s against the TOS. Hence, my advice not to do it.
And I don’t use Real Player (unless I’m forced to) because everything is by default!
We do agree with the exception of one thing - not all hosts allow it. If you look on my post the #1 point is that many hosts don’t allow it…
I also stated that if one decided to do it what can possibly happen. Again, to bring awareness on what could happen so an informed decision can be made.
Ultimately it’s the blogger’s decision but just because a plug-in is available doesn’t mean it can legally (TOS) be used. See what I mean?
Comment by Tyme — March 15, 2005 @ 12:19 pm PST
Where did I ever say that “all hosts allow it” — again, you are putting words into my mouth, Tyme. Can you please point me to where I ever said that specifically?
One thing business bloggers should want to do is control their destiny and business, don’t you think? I think you are talking about personal bloggers, not business bloggers, which is out of the realm of what I was trying to get out of this thread. I’m not a personal blogger. At least not at this blog, anyway, so the relevance here on that subject is almost nil.
I know you are writing a book, Tyme, so I hope in that book you will make a clear distinction between business and personal blogging because there are many difference as far as hosting, programming, advertising, etc between the two.
When crossing over to draw parallels some caution is in order.
Really, ask yoursef: do free-hosted bloggers even have a choice in something like this? The answer is no. I mean if you use MSN Spaces you can’t add any server-side code to a blog like that. So this discussion bringing in personal bloggers is sort of a moot point. Maybe a little javascript one can add, if s/he is lucky … and even that they try to lock down.
Comment by TDavid — March 15, 2005 @ 12:46 pm PST
Ok…I see where the problem is. You think my ENTIRE post is about you. It’s not…I used you as a live example and moved on away from you to bloggers in general. From the emails and comments I received most people get that and thanked me for pointing it out because most had not checked prior and were in some sort of violation.
Dedicated servers can run into violation as well since many bandwidth providers have opt in in their TOS, so the data center would have to comply. Again, people do this all the time and never have a problem. Others get smacked when a problem occurs and wonder what happened.
So could you please stop making my entire post about you, because it’s not. Maybe I should change “you” (which I always use because it’s me talking to the blogger like a conversation) to “one” or “blogger” or something. Everyone else gets the fact you were an example, nothing else.
Comment by Tyme — March 15, 2005 @ 1:06 pm PST
(remember, it’s just an experiment!)
The numbers can always change:
The hosting company - jury still out
Tyme - no / against
Lestat - yes / for
FranciscoIV - yes / for
Marcus - yes / for
So the scorecard so far looks like this:
3 yes, 1 no and at least 1 unknown (but a lot more that haven’t commented or trackbacked here and made their voice heard to date).
Currently, I would list myself as simply: “maybe.” Tyme hasn’t swayed my opinion one iota, but the three people who responded to this positively have made me think that this is something I should consider more seriously than I actually was before posting. Again, when I post at various places I would like to be reminded in most cases for follow-up posts.
Some people are wayyy too persnickity when it comes to just hitting delete on notifications. It’s not the same as being pitched for some random spam or phishing attack. It’s a notification that somebody is trying to continue a discussion you were involved in. It’s like the phone ringing. You answer it (visit the site and reply) or don’t (hit delete on the email). End of story.
Not a big deal.
Obviously the hosting company carries the most significant weight and their perspective is critical to this experiment.
(remember, it’s just an experiment!)
Would love to get more feedback on this and don’t forget to uncheck the box if you don’t want to be auto-notified by email. After all, that’s what we’re discussing in this … experiment.
Comment by TDavid — March 15, 2005 @ 5:51 pm PST
I like this experiment. I had quite seriously forgotten that I responded to this ‘post’ since yesterday. It was quite nice to have the replies via email, and read through comments and watch the ‘thread’ develop. In my opinion, it enhances the blogness, and adds to the community of it.
Comment by Lestat — March 16, 2005 @ 9:29 am PST
I forgot to include my thoughts on the default being checked or not. I think it’s just fine. So If I didnt want to watch the thread and it arrives in my inbox….So I click on the remove myself from the email notification link, and delete the email… no biggie
Comment by Lestat — March 16, 2005 @ 9:34 am PST
Lestat - I’m glad you pointed that out. I received a response from the owner of the hosting company (cyberwurx.com) for MakeYouGoHmm.com. He reviewed this thread, the checkbox and here is his position on the entire matter (he also gave me permission to post this on his behalf):
CYBERWURX HOSTING RESPONSE:
“I really do not consider that as spam, like you said there is a bit of effort involved to receive the emails. So really if anyone did complain, or a company came back and said we are going to blackhole your IPs space you
can really show them what’s involved. I really do not see that as spam or a problem at all. If anyone complained you would have enough proof to show they wanted it, and it would be ridiculous to complain.” - Cyberwurx.com
The word “advice” has been thrown around in this thread and in other places and erroneously attributed to my name.
However, now I actually am going to dispense some advice that I’ve given many, many times before. For those who have heard it, please excuse the redundancy. Here we go:
Anyone who owns and operates a legitimate website operation and is concerned about their website and hosting should consider switching to Cyberwurx. We’ve been satisfied, paying customers of theirs since 1999 and they’ve been operating a professional hosting business since 1997. We use other hosting companies too that I will mention from time to time, but Cyberwurx is one of my personal and professional favorite hosting companies on the web.
And please note that I intentionally italicized “legitimate website operation” — if anyone reading this is involved in a scam, spam or any other bullshit setup / website, then signup for some other hosting company. I don’t want these kind of illegitimate, illegal businesses on the web screwing up a really good hosting operation.
I’ve done programming, script installs and worked with clients using literally 100+ different hosts on the web over the years and Cyberwurx is among the best out there I’ve encountered so far. But don’t take my word for it, though, because hey I’m probably just biased as a satisfied paying customer and paid contributer to their blog, right? Try them out for yourselves.
Cyberwurx has blog hosting plans too (plans starting as low as $5 USD), and they include a free Wordpress installation when signing up, so check their blog plans out here: http://www.cyberwurx.com/blog.html
Put my name — TDavid — in the referral section when signing up so Cyberwurx knows who sent you. They’ll take good care of you like they take care of us
Comment by TDavid — March 16, 2005 @ 10:58 am PST
[…] if it would be kosher. Heck, I got taken a little bit to task over just making a freaking checkbox default checked (which is still under consideration for change, BTW), so you can bet people o […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Syndic8 on the hot seat for gaming search engines — May 12, 2005 @ 1:37 pm PST
[…] But first, perhaps for some readers our comment policy might be unclear and I decided to revisit it and explain in more detail how we handle comments at this blog. I’ve written about this subject before in saying that we intentionally do not use rel=’nofollow’ on the comments and I want the search engines to follow commenter’s links. […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Debating what is/isn’t spam in comments sections — September 28, 2005 @ 11:30 am PST
I’ll leave the box for the GGR topic checked for now - and hope that the comments stay on-topic. It is truly amazing how quickly a discussion turns into a battle of personalities. (does anybody else find a curious parallel to the CB craze of the mid-70’s?)
-bp-
Comment by Bob Peelstrom — December 19, 2005 @ 4:39 am PST
Bob - good point. Thanks for stopping by, reading, and taking time to comment
Comment by TDavid — December 19, 2005 @ 11:56 am PST
[…] - be more conversational and interactive with readers when appropriate. Ask questions, get feedback. - reply to the feedback promptly. While this can be dififcult for busy people especially, try to acknowledge at least some comments left by the same person otherwise they’ll think you aren’t listening (keep reading) or don’t care. Nothing worse than spending time leaving a comment on somebody’s blog and they act like you don’t even exist. I can’t and don’t respond to every blog comment left here, but I do read them all and currently have the most comments of anybody left on this blog. One goal of mine is to keep it that way. - have an email follow-up/update feature but do not ever, ever, ever, ever use this for any other off-topic purpose. When new posts are added make it easy for readers to get an email when a new comment is added. One reader got on my case when I this feature was introduced here because we made this feature default checked (something, I’m usually against, BTW). I’ve left this checked because I think it’s a handy feature and I don’t spam anybody, so wasn’t worried. Also, to date only one reader has ever complained that it should be unchecked by default. This one is up to you. - take interest in readers. Remember things about readers mentioned in comments and write/refer to them when relevant. This shows you are listening, paying attention and actually care. - return the favor. Show up on your reader’s blogs in the comment area or blog about something they’ve blogged about. [note: there are some reader’s blogs that I do not like the comment forms (too much work). Please make it easy for readers to leave a comment on your blog. I rarely will register/login just to leave a comment] Wish I could do this one more often. Anybody that has regularly left comments here will see me either link to their blog, show up at their site or both eventually. And now with our weekly Hmmcast, I’m also reading some of the Hmm-worthy comments in the podcast so this is an additional opportunity for me to show some love back. [You are all listening to the new weekly Hmmcast, right?] - turn off rel=nofollow. This goes with the one above, but if you are adding rel=nofollow to your comment sig URLs. You might leave the body of the comments rel=nofollow for URLs but at least take off the block on the signature to the reader’s name (that’s how it works here). Recently I realized after the last upgrade that the rel=nofollow wasn’t enabled. Please, readers, if you see this is the case tell me. I wouldn’t do this intentionally, but I’m human and therefore screw things up sometimes. In my haste to upgrade I didn’t re-enable the WP plugin I use to strip that out of the signature URLs. […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Dude, where’s my comments? — April 22, 2006 @ 9:49 am PST
[…] “Subscribe to comments“, by Jennifer (aka Scripty Goddess — an alias designed to get your PHP pumping). Enables putting a “Subscribe to comments via e-mail” checkbox on your comments forms. This plugin requires a little more work than most — besides uploading to two different folders and activating it, you have to add the checkbox code to your comment forms in your theme. But it seems to work — at least with my theme. I followed TDavid’s lead and checked the checkbox by default — but I’d like to hear your opinions on that decision. Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]
Pingback by Plugin the power for my commenting comrades -- Chip’s Quips — July 5, 2006 @ 2:06 pm PST
As of July 26, 2006, we now have a formal commenting policy, please see this page.
Comment by TDavid — September 12, 2006 @ 3:29 pm PST
The average experienced computer user is always on the lookout for check marks. Anyone who has been interneting for many years has been a victim of check marks great and small. The actual check mark itself should tell the user to read what is being checked.
Personally I noticed that it was checked by default and it led me to this page because I wanted to know what I was being “checked” for.
I think it is a good thing to have it marked, this enables people who post and care about their post to see any updates. This also should make people aware of other sites that have “mysterious” check marks. If anything just allow for an UNSUBSCRIBE link within the email that follows the post.
Just my humble,
Kimberly
Comment by Kimberly — January 15, 2007 @ 12:47 am PST
I appreciate your review of the ManagerAssistant. I was a business owner for 16 years and am totally blind. Thanks for being conscious of the needs of others.
Comment by Phyllis Stevens — March 4, 2007 @ 1:05 pm PST
Your welcome Phyllis, thanks for stopping by
Comment by TDavid — March 4, 2007 @ 4:51 pm PST
[…] Using this plugin is a no-brainer…so what’s the point of this post? Simple. This post was written to foster a debate regarding the use of this super plugin. I found a two other posts on this subject when doing a Google search, but I want my reader’s opinions so I’m writing this post to find out first hand. Interestingly enough the two posts I found ( one here and the other here) had opposing views giving me a foundation for writing this post and addressing some original concerns. […]
Pingback by Subscribe To Comments debate » eJabs — March 20, 2007 @ 11:51 am PST
I say leave it on! It bothers me when I leave a comment then I hit submit only to realize I forgot to check the subscribe checkbox!
Further…every email subscribers receive has an opt-out link!
I wrote a post on this subject as well.
Comment by Matthew Jabs — March 20, 2007 @ 11:52 am PST
Matthew - This is the only blog I contribute to where it’s default checked but in the two years since this was written the only negative comments on it being default checked remain in the comments above.
Comment by TDavid — March 20, 2007 @ 12:22 pm PST
You know what’s funny…I wrote that post, and I linked to this article and the opposing view article. I commented on both with the link to my post…then I subscribed to your comments and I didn’t to his! If he would have had it checked by default…I would have subscribed. Just to prove a point I suppose. Funny.
Comment by Matthew Jabs — March 20, 2007 @ 12:28 pm PST