I’m free!
Thanks for all the excellent advice on answering endless questions from creationists. I’ve now closed comments on the offending post with the following:
“This will be the last comment on this post.
The original post was written almost a year ago, and yet it still takes up more of my time than all my other posts put together. People keep inserting links to this page on internet discussion boards etc, and while I’m flattered that they’d think of me, it’s something I have no control over and it makes a huge amount of work for me. I just don’t have the time to keep on answering questions from comments that run to several pages, or even from short comments such as the one immediately above, the answer to which would require me to make some diagrams and write a whole new post. Quite frankly, as someone who is just starting out on a freelance writing career, if I’m going to put that amount of work into it, I may as well write an article or even a book and make some money!
So thank you all for your comments and for this conversation. Comments are now disabled on this post”.
Hopefully the comments won’t just transfer to another post…
I think you did the right thing. I’ve had problems like this a few times, and I generally close the comment section if people start repeating questions that were already answered because it shows they don’t read the comments anyhow (not to mention reading the post to begin with). Depending on the length of the average comment this happens somewhere between 150 and 250 in my experience. I call that the comment-section recurrence time đ
Good for you, Cath.
Very good plan and a good model for the rest of us.
Sabine, 150 – 250 comments?! I don’t think I have that many on the entire blog! But the ones on this particular post were extremely long.
Yeah. Oohm. Try writing about the end of the world at some point, it attracts readers. Currently, it’s this thread on black holes at the LHC that I’m thinking about closing down. It’s almost a month old, and despite having dropped out the ‘recent posts’ list, people still comment and comment and comment. I can very well relate to the problem of ‘endless questions’. It always feels like you should answer them, because otherwise somebody could think you don’t have an answer…
Now that does sound like fun. Maybe I’ll come over and see if I can think of a brand new question for you!