Hooray!
Colin Devroe’s post was the tipping point (I told you his points were compelling) and I decided it was time to get over myself and look at opening things up again.
This is the post Walker is referring to. You can read his follow-up as well.
Like me, Walker has opened up comments on his blog.
Any one that has a blog and is worried about moderating comments can let that fear go. Those days are over. Even if you’re incredibly popular there are tools that would make this relatively easy (like Disqus). And since the site is 100% yours that allows you to be super strict in your policies should that need arise.
One side note: I have WordPress set to automatically close comments on posts older than 30 days. Perhaps 8 or 10 years ago I wrote a WordPress plugin that did this since most comment spam was a result of a bot that worked like a Google spider. It found related posts via Google and left comment spam. By closing comments on posts older than 30 days this alleviates a huge amount of spam. This feature is now built into WordPress and works perfectly. It isn’t ideal, and I may consider turning that off in the future, but for now it means I only get about 5 spam comments per week which are automatically blocked by Akismet.