My boss and I used to have a huge problem with regulating comments on our old blog (http://tupelobizbuzz.wordpress.com/). People would post bad/vulgar/mean comments. We used our judgment about what stayed and what went. Sure enough, people talk about the ones you delete and they hold a grudge against you. And, someone else will say it.

On our new blog (http://nems360.com/pages/bizbuzz), we don’t have the option to delete comments so everything stays. I was weirded out at first, but I’ve come to like it. I honestly think it’s better because when you start deleting stuff, you are swaying the comments to your side of the discussion. If people are talking about it, let them put it on the blog. In our case, the other readers started policing the comments and would call out stupid commenters as such.

Interesting idea about closing the comments. Would you ever think about re-opening it for comments after the discussion died down in case people wanted to post about the event later?

I tried to be clear what I was doing, which is about all you CAN do.