Happy New Year, library publishers! Since we launched our new website in October, we’ve really enjoyed having a blog where we can quickly share information with the community and do some informal publishing. When we originally set it up, we turned on the commenting function so that readers would have an opportunity to participate in the conversation. We were not, however, terribly surprised when we didn’t get any. Blog commenting in general has become less useful as platforms like Twitter and Facebook have gained prominence, and it’s increasingly common for news sites and other online publications to disable commenting. The amount of time we spend moderating spam comments is pretty minimal [1], and if the comments function was proving useful to the community, we would happily invest that time to keep the content human-generated. As it is, we have made the decision to instead turn off commenting and focus our website-maintaining energy elsewhere. This is an easily-reversible decision, and one we will happily revisit in future if the need arises. In the meantime, we would encourage you to comment on LPC blog posts on the listserv (members), on Twitter (everyone), or on your own blog (feel free to send us a link that we can share).
[1] And, honestly, it was all worth it when we got a spam comment that read, “Your goal is to breed all the different dragons available to you.”