FT has had an on/off relationship with comments in the past. We’ve had ilx response threads, haloscan’s limited memory comments, and experimented with blogger’s comments a couple of times, but with WordPress, it’s a whole new baffling world. Thankfully I can see wordpress comments as something we can sustain for some time. The volume of spam comments (usually attempts to increase page-ranking via links) was enormous in our first month, but it’s all nicely filtered out, with just the odd false +ve and a couple of the crazier ones getting through temporarily.
Popular has a healthy commuity of commenters, and a couple of posts have garnered some ace random googlers, so who knows what it could lead to.
To safeguard against comment etiquette disasters, i’d like to point the FT contributors (and hey, why not, the readers) to a couple of posts from WordPress guru Lorelle on the do’s and don’t’s of the comment box: Comments on Comments and How Not To Comment on Comments.
Obv, don’t take everything she says as gospel, but it gives some outside perspective on how blogonline journals and their reader community work these days.