I know somebody who’ll be interested in this poll….
At the bottom of the comment box on mine, and many other Wordpress blogs, is the option to ‘Subscribe to comments’. For those of you who don’t know, ticking this box will result in you being emailed each time a comment is added to the post upon which you have commented. The email will contain the text of the new comment, and it is a very useful way to keep up to date with comment conversations.
There is an option built into this where I can set the check box to be empty, so YOU choose to subscribe, or I can set it to be pre-filled so that you will be automatically subscribed every time you comment.
There are two schools of thought on this:
- The reader should be the one to choose whether or not to subscribe: People can be annoyed by receiving emailed comments without explicitly asking for them, and could even mark you as a spammer.
- The reader should opt-out if they wish, so as to keep them involved and making more comments. Also, if they forget to subscribe, they cannot correct this without leaving an additional comment.
So what’s your opinion on this? Do you like to be automatically subscribed, or would it annoy you to have the decision made for you? I currently opt for No.1 above, but I’m open to be persuaded.
As ever, please temporarily disable any ad-blocker if you cannot see the poll. Thanks.
19 users commented in " The Sunday Poll - Subscribe To Comments "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackNothing personal to you Chris. I just would not want ‘everyone’ to auto-sub me.
By definition, any unsolicited e-mail is spam. Most readers would not appreciate it. Offerring the option can be very helpful though.
I prefer to use coComment or Commentful.
I dislike it, if i want to see what is happening in a particular comment conversation i come back.
Not many people going for auto….
I use the same plugin you do. The readers have to click the box. There’s another plugin, and I don’t know where it is, that allows you to subscribe without commenting so that you can go back and subscribe if you forgot to.
Well well, just as I suspected. I’m going to have to change my box to be unchecked by default.
Based on your results & the comments from my post, it looks like it’s in overwhelming favor to give the reader the choice.
Thanks Chris! PS…can you change the link in this post from http:// ejabs. com to http:// http://www.eJabs .com? Thanks.
honestly, no joke…I forgot to check the box again to subscribe, so I had to leave this additional comment.
No problem, I’ll change the URL-not sure how it ended up like that, as I usually cut & paste a URL the first time I use it, and after that it’s ‘auto-completed’.
Hey-ho.
Glad the poll is of use.
I turned mine off…I have one problem though.
Both your’s & my subscribe to boxes appear at the bottom of the page, as opposed to right below the comment box. If you look at RT’s, you’ll notice that his is right below the box. Do you know how we can get ours to be directly below the box & not at the bottom of the page?
Looks like it only happens in Firefox. IE7 is good, not sure about IE6
Chris:
I figured out the fix to the “Subscribe To Comments” plugin displaying the subscription box at the bottom of the page (in Firefox only). Here’s the fix, thanks to Paul at Paul O’Flaherty.
“In Subscribe to Comments Version 2.1 lines 23, 36 and 46 read:
clear_both) echo ’style=”clear: both;” ‘; ?>class=”subscribe-to-comments”>
Replace those lines 23,36 and 46 with the following
< p>
That’s it! After doing that the Subscribe to comments box should appear where it’s supposed to.”
[Note from Chris, remove extra space after first '<' ]
You may want to edit that last comment Chris…a couple of the tags I used messed up the formatting of the comment.
Nice one Matt, that works a treat
I’ve noticed this on your blog for awhile, but had no idea it was this way on my blog…
I wanted to let you know about it, and when I found the fix I had to pass it on.
I think I may write a post about exactly how to do it.
I already have, it goes up tomorrow
With suitable credit of course….
Sure, go ahead…as long as credit is there!
you evil, evil man you! 
I don’t like the auto opt-in.
I only comment on blogs that I read frequently or plan on checking back.
I prefer manual subscription.
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