A Comment on (Promotional) Comments

As you all know, I love to receive comments from all of you and I frequently highlight them in posts. But recently I'm seeing a lot more comments like:

• "I'm writing about this topic now at (link inserted to the person's site)"
• "Here's a great link that discusses the same issue (link inserted to the person's site)"
• Signatures with URL's in them (to the person's own site) separate from the hyperlinks Typepad creates automatically.

These comments are not really helpful to the discussion here -- they are simply attempts to promote a person's individual site. Therefore, from now on, I will be deleting all such comments I feel are primarily for self promotion.

If you want to promote your own site/post here, there are legitimate ways of doing it. The two best are:

• Leave an intelligent comment and submit your URL in the comment form when you do. Your comment will then contain a link to your site. If someone reads your comment and likes what it has to say, they'll click through.
• Write whatever you want to say on the topic on your own blog, include a link to the FMF post you're referring to, and send a trackback to FMF. Then there will be a link from my post to yours to send traffic (legitimately) to your site.

I certainly don't want to discourage the rest of you who are leaving useful links to stop doing so (such as links to studies, government data, etc.), but I do want to put an end to the posts that seem to be mostly "please look at me" sorts of posts.

I hope you all understand and can appreciate my thoughts on this subject.

Comments

[nick]

I agree with you. I have found certain comments distracting in the last couple of weeks.

[fivecentnickel.com]

I also agree. In fact, I think this is such a good idea that I wrote a post about it at... (Just kidding.)

I've been seeing more of this recently, and haven't really decided how to deal with it. But here's the bottom line: If you've had interesting thoughts on a topic, then include them in your comment. If you'd rather keep the info on your site, then that's fine, but don't post an ad for it.

[Flexo]

I've been dealing with this for a while. If the comment is good except for the self-promotion, I'll often edit the comment to delete the link, but I haven't been fastidious about it. When I redesigned the other day, I added an editor's caveat:

"This probably goes without saying, but any spam will be deleted. Any gratuitous promotions of a website or business out of context will also be deleted. Any personal attacks will be deleted. Just about everything else goes. Enjoy!"