Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-188432-20140714194533/@comment-188432-20140717160844

I think it's a little bit beyond my remit here to advocate one course of action or another on the matter of whether comments are a net plus or negative. So let me just add some thoughts to frame the discussion.

TTF is absolutely right to suggest football is contentious and it might well make for some heated discussions. If those discussions get really heated, it could well be a significant problem that would warrant the closure of comments.

On the other hand the commenting feature does drive traffic, and it might be a positive for this site.

Some things to consider when making a decision:
 * Not every rivalry leads to horrible comments. This being the global football site, we might find that the comments come from a wide variety of fans — not all of whom have their rage against rivals set to 11.
 * Admin are janitors. It's their lot in life to clean up messes. Unless there's significant and persistent damage being done to a community, it's probably best to ban individual users rather than shut down a feature that the vast majority of the community are using properly.

As a technical matter, you can turn off article comments but still have commenting on blogs. Article comments are merely a different presentation of namespace 1, whereas the comments on User blogs are in fact namespace 501. They're two totally different namespaces, so I'm pretty sure there's not a way for admin to turn off blog comments without some jiggerypokery in CSS/JS.