Dear GOOD.is What Not to Do in Your Comments Section

Posted by Jesse Poe on December 11 at 12:37 PM So you have built a site, written a blog and even got people to read it. Now what about the comments?

People use the comment sections to dialogue with other commenters and of course you the writter/brand. If you are lucky enough to get some one to engage with you why would you cut them short?

Imagine you finally get a business call and you limit it to 99 words. Come on.

Here is a lesson from GOOD.is who I usually adore, on how not to run your site.

They had a great post, I chimed in with a researched response adding to the post and encouraging conversation. My comment was 535 words of support and added value. GOOD truncates at 99 words, my other 436 words lost.

So I wrote a letter to them explaining how truncated comments don't exactly encourage conversation.

A week later still no response. Strike 2.

Here are the two take aways:

1. GOOD.is lost a passionate follower and turned a Zealot to a detractor over an HTLM code that could say 10,000 instead of 99, and by not caring enough to respond to their email. Why even have a "contact us" if you don't respond? Not a good situation.

2. Cut me off in the comments and I will just post a sidewiki which will immediately get picked up by Google. Lucky for good, the passion behind my 535 words, including the 436 they cut off was positive. Imagine had I been upset about what they wrote..... their word count limit would have made me even angrier.

What would be the draw back, well, that you might get a spambot that hacks in and leaves 30000 links on a comment, who cares, take it out, much better to be troubled once in a while by something everyone must face, than to limit interaction when interaction is what you are after and turn a brand zealot to a detractor.

GOOD work guys you lost a fan.

picture of the sidewiki:


Letter to GOOD.is which they never responded to:

Dear GOOD-

I preach your gospel, book mark you and always link to you in my own blogs, I think  your doing a great job & have turned on many friends to your site.

Today I have to say that I am more than displeased with your site.

You posted a great article and I wrote a passionate response of 535 words.

You cut me off at 50 or so.... not a "good" practice, be glad that you have people who follow your site who care enough to write that much.

Adjust your word count to allow for as long as people want, that would be not only good but right.

It's hard to find people who are passionate to help and support, it's easy to loose people over stupid things like this, I just spent an hour of my time helping your site and now what?

Bad practice, GOOD.

I hope you fix this, before people just take the conversation elsewhere.

Would still like to be a fan-

jesse poe




Topics: Internet, social_networking, strategy, web_design        SHARE: