September 1, 2019 — Ever since we began Confessions of the Professions over 7 years ago, the idea was always to create a sense of community. When we published articles, we wanted our visitors to come along and comment their thoughts and opinions on any article they pleased. For a long time, we actually did not receive many comments, and much of it was often spam-related. After installing multiple scripts to prevent the issue of spam comments, we started receiving legitimate comments, and for a time, everything was good.
We have been back and forth of suspending our comment system and then placing it back so that our visitors could have a place to chat. However, in our efforts to move to a more static website, we cannot continue to keep a comment system. After monitoring our comment system for the past 2 years, we’ve come to the conclusion that more people prefer to read the articles and then end up leaving the page or the website. As a result, we feel that removing the comment system will actually have no effect on visitor retention.
With the trends of the web on news sites, who also made a decision to remove comments from their websites, we are going forward without any comment systems. If you must make a comment, please feel free to do so by sharing the article on your own social media pages, Twitter, or Facebook, and linking back to the article. As you read our website, you will notice there are no more comments below the article.
Our major reason for our doing this is a move to cache the website indefinitely for faster page loading times. With a comment system, the cache must be cleared, which often causes the cache to clear. To ensure that comments were fresh and up to date, we would often ensure that the cache was cleared every 24 hours. Instead of worrying about comments, we are more focused on delivering quality content and fast loading articles on our website, thus, there will be no more comment system.
If you have an issue with this, feel free to let us know why you believe the comment system should be put back. If we get enough interest from people who want to comment on the website, we will happily accommodate, but for now, we have made the decision to remove comments from our website.
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