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, personal attacks, etc., left on one’s talkpage. Comment access on userpages would provide a back door in to vandalizing a userpage on those wikis where userpage editing access is otherwise protected to all but the userpage owner (and hopefully, someday soon, to admins and bureaucrats).

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 the 17 pages of comments on this blog to see what I mean.

Also, it is much easier to present and format information in a proper editing window like one gets in the various talk namespaces, than one can do in a tiny little comment window that provides no preview, little physical space, etc., etc.

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(s) in the MediaWiki namespace to disable comments in certain namespaces. Drilling further down, if comments are activated in a given namespace, and it is desired that a certain page in that namespace 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.

P.P.S. If the CSS/JS code and magic word mentioned in the above postscript already exist, would someone please pass it along? Thanks!