We are having a debate and I need your help.

We have a business blog that we posts articles on regulatory and informative information. We have a comment section. Should we limit how long anyone can post a comment? It has been recommended by a team member to shut off comments after 60 days.

I would like to know what others are doing with comment posts. Do you shut them down after a period of time?

@julihanshaw There are two camps on that. One, you want to be able to give everyone the chance to comment, even if they find a post a year old. Some people find it frustrating when they want to comment on something but can’t.

Two, the longer you leave the comments open, the more spam you are likely to have to manage. If that isn’t an issue, then leaving the comments open shouldn’t be a problem. I left my comments open indefinitely up until earlier this year when I couldn’t handle the amount of spam. The issue is that the older the posts are, the more SEO value they have to people who want to comment to build links, hence older posts are hit way more than newer ones.

@julihanshaw

I would take a pro/con approach to turning off commenting after a certain amount of time.
Pro: You don’t have to monitor these old posts and respond to readers comments. You save time by only monitoring more recent posts.
Con: You’re telling a visitor that wants to engage with your site by commenting that you don’t have the time for them.
I think any kind of user engagement is very important. It keeps them on your site longer. If they’re willing to comment on an old post they most likely will be interested in newer content and engaging with that as well.

My posts tend to get a ton of “backlinking spam comment posts”. Granted, I do leave have audit turned on so only approved comments get seen but, I’ll log on to my blog and I’ll have hundreds of spam comments to weed through.

I turn off comments because of this.

Another alternative, change your comments section to a Disqus panel with the Wordpress plug-in. Only people registered with Discus can add comments or “enter into the discussion”. Definitely cuts down the spam comments to nil.