It’s been a tough decision, but I’ve decided to disable comments for two of my most recent plugins: Ajax Edit Comments and Comment Sorter.

My main drivers towards this decision are:

The Ajax Edit Comments page took “forever” to load

After removing comments, and moving the screenshots and changelog, the page loads significantly faster.

I rarely solved problems through comments

The majority of the problems I’ve helped people with were through e-mail. Some people did alert me of problems through comments, but I would actually prefer an e-mail in the case of a problem or issue.

I set up a new support form to handle plugin inquiries.

The comment e-mails didn’t apply to other authors here

Here at RA Project, all authors receive all comment e-mails so we feel like we’re apart of the site conversation. With plugin comments, this wasn’t the case.

A lot of the comments were “test” comments. I tried to remedy this by posting demonstration videos, but that didn’t stop the test comments.

I encourage those who wish to test the plugin to leave a relevant comment on any one of our posts.

Support Requests Are Time Consuming

Support requests are time consuming, so I have set up a support form to filter all the various requests I usually get for the plugins here at RA Project.

For those who have urgent support requests, a donation to RA Project is encouraged.

All monies received will go towards the contributors of the plugin (I would “love” to compensate the wonderful translators and testers) and back to RA Project and its readers.

The Issue of Disabling Comments

There were lots of comments left on the Ajax Edit Comments page. More than three-hundred the last time I checked (they’re still alive and well in our database). But cutting them out sped up the page significantly (night and day difference).

For Comment Sorter, I’ve disabled the comments from the beginning. And already the support form has been used and used successfully.

Hopefully in the long-run this will prove beneficial to the reader, the users of the plugin, and the RA Project authors.

If you would like to weigh in on this, please leave a comment below.

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