When I first made the site for Leftover Soup, I could have imported some code or other to create a comments section. Instead, I elected to create a forum. The differences are largely cosmetic and incidental, but forums feel more substantial and worthwhile to me than comments sections do. Maybe I'm just old-school.

I try to foster a sense of community on my forum, I run contests and post special stuff there, I encourage readers to post there whenever I can... but I'm under no illusions with regards to its importance. It is common wisdom at this point in Internet history to "never read the comments", and there's a good reason for that. In a world in which every photo, every news article, every essay, every movie, every song, every poem can be - and, indeed, must be - annotated with "hitlershitballs lol", a certain amount of disregard is necessary to maintain one's mental health.

Important, life-changing discourse rarely, if ever, occurs in a comments section or equivalent. My personal philosophy has always been "big people act, small people react". But then, as I said, I'm old-school.

I mean, yes, occasionally you'll meet a hottie in a webcomics forum, that person will travel thousands of miles to be with you, you'll get married for nine-odd years and counting, but that's a pretty rare circumstance.