User blog comment:NeonSpotlight/Where did comments go?/@comment-88.88.86.118-20120807203151/@comment-76.116.253.31-20120807230257

Reading DiamondDragon's posts really makes me think of the sort of reaction mainstream publishers have been having to user generated content in general: "The NERVE of these plebians, how dare they sully my profession with their spewed drivel!"

I suppose it's evidence that wikis have "made it" that we now see the same sort of elitist, exclusionary reaction from people around here...

Sites should be embracing more user generated content, not trying to exclude it. Becoming some ivory tower, elitist social club will only drive users elsewhere. You'll have your perfect little encyclopedia, but no one will read it.

And as far as a perfect little encyclopedia: There is often some crucial (to me) detail missing from the articles here, and a few minutes of diving through the comments usually answers the rest of my questions satisfactorily. The example I will give is one from mere minutes ago: I was curious what long duration abilities besides Morgana and Kennen's ultimates aren't interrupted by Zhonya's Hourglass. Searching through the comments gave me my answer. I think clicked Zhonya's Ring to show my wife what the item used to be, and was lead by a link on that page here...

You can argue all you want that the information I wanted about the item should have been in the article itself, but another editor will argue that such minutae is out of scope, or that maintaining such a list would be a maintenance nightmare, or that the information isn't verifiable without extensive testing, which then you'd have to do... And so you'd give up trying to add such information to the article. So where should useful information that doesn't necessarily belong in the article itself go, except in the comments section? Via the comments, useful facts can be gathered, distributed testing done, and an editor (upon reading through the list), may decide to add such facts to the article, if the explanations of them in the comments seem trustworthy.

TL;DR: I hate spam as much as the next guy, but this is a website built explicitly to hold user generated content. Find ways to encourage more positive contribution instead of concentrating on preventing contributions you don't like.