User blog comment:Dopp/Giving User Profiles Some Love/@comment-1091639-20110707111923/@comment-3388044-20110708105230

We’re leaving our comments here because that is how it is set-up: We have no choice. Talkpage access is essentially disabled in the blog namespace. There is no other way to make these comments.

Comments have enormous drawbacks. Primary among these is that one cannot view diffs in any form, let alone chronologically. (I cheat to view new comments since my last visit by using a combination of Special:PrefixIndex and NavigationPopups, but that’s another story …) Sure, you get a notice in your email that there are new comments, but where in the many pages of comments to a given blog are they? And you haven’t dealt with the fact that comments added to a userpage (i.e., User:Username … the basepage in one’s userspace) cannot be deleted by the userpage owner (at least I think not) unlike vandalism, spam, attacks, left on one’s talkpage. Comment access on userpages would provide a back door in to vandalizing a userpage on those wikis where access to editing the userpage proper.

Let’s not forget the functional brilliance of a talkpage when it comes to keeping threaded topics together. With comments, you get the same topic being discussed in multiple points throughout the comments section. Just take a look at this blog to see what I mean.

Comments on userpages …  :(

P.S. Currently whether comments exist at all on a wiki is optional. If it stays that way, great! If it comes to pass that a wiki enables comments, then there should be some CSS/JS code that can be added to the appropriate page in the MediaWiki namespace to turn it off in certain namespaces. Drilling further down, if it is activated in a given namespace and it is desired that a certain page not have comments, then there should be a magic word created that can be placed atop such a page to disable comments on that page only.