As you may have noticed, the comment section of most articles on this site contains at most five questions (with answers) – and you cannot post new comments and instead, you are redirected to the BikeGremlin forum. Why?
More than a few website articles had dozens (or hundreds) of comments. That made the pages be extremely long and difficult to navigate. However, most of the comments contain good (and frequently asked in real life) questions & answers. That’s why I wanted to preserve them, instead of just deleting them.
Just as important: I wanted to be able to easily find the questions and answers. It often happens that I get basically the same questions over and over, and I can’t always find the previous answer so I can just direct to it (or copy/paste it).
The best case scenario is that readers will do the search and find the answers themselves. 🙂
The original questions are still on the website, but on separate pages (under “Older Comments”), set to not be indexed by any search engines (for reasons explained in this article). Hopefully, in a few days, all the copied comments (and answers) will be found on the forum search, while the website search will be returning only article information.
This should make it easier to find information and answers. Forum search will return one forum post, containing about five questions and answers – not a website page with a hundred questions and answers.
I think this is more logical, more practical, and better in the long run.
P.S.
To prevent articles with hundreds of comments from “happening” in the future, website comments are “closed” and visitors are directed to the forum for any questions or comments (for new articles, the comments are automatically “closed” 45 days after the article’s publish date, but in case of any “mass comments” I can always “manually” close the comment section sooner).
Relja
