I’ve seen a number of comments today about how this blog doesn’t have comments. That is quite true. Part of the reason is that up until December of 2004 this blog was about as old-fashioned as it could be: it was a straightforward html text file, nothing more. No RSS. Nothing. So, obviously, comments were not even an option. However, we could certainly activate that function now, as our base program can handle it. And I have thought about putting comments on a small number of blog entries just to give some folks a chance to “speak.”
But the fact of the matter is, the breadth of topics we cover through this ministry is so wide that I have, over the years, collected quite a rogue’s gallery of opponents (that’s the nice word). All you have to do is go to amazon.com and look at the wild-eyed, utterly worthless ravings of so many who use amazon as their sole means of lashing out in defense of their positions to know what kind of constant “clean up” we’d be doing in a comments section. I personally feel our readers would rather have me spending my time writing than policing a cyber-version of Romper Room (wow, that dated me just a bit). Further, a comments section would be the equivalent of the main street of an old western town: everytime I’d sit down to get some serious work done, I’d hear some new young gun calling me out, ready to try his hand. When I was young, that would have been attractive. It lost its attraction a long time ago.
I suppose, if I did not do a live webcast twice a week with a toll-free phone number, and if we didn’t have an online community where one can respectfully ask questions and interact, and if I hid away from public settings and never did debates or appear on call-in radio programs, one might think providing a comments section would be required to allow for “the other side.” But the fact is that I am probably one of the most accessible folks around. Hence, the time investment of policing a comments section is simply not worth it.
