Comments on a separate page

The ability to have comments on a separate page from articles/books/pages/etc, if the admin so wishes, would be an attractive feature for Drupal to have.

As case study, I'll relate what happened to me when I tried to get my girlfriend to drop MovableType and switch to Drupal.

Although she loved many of Drupal's outstanding features (in particular she loved books and the rss aggregator), as soon as she realized that comments are always displayed on the same page as content nodes, and that I had no idea how to 'fix' that, she immediately went: "No way, forget it."
Since I was perplexed at her vehemence, she explained to me that since she uses her blog to post her poetry snippets, and she likes to have anonymous comments enabled (she says the lack of hassle encourages people who otherwise wouldn't bother to comment), she really needs to have comments on an another page, because she may be fine with people occasionally criticizing her poetry, but that doesn't mean she wants to see the harsh words right under her poem, where other readers might be influenced in their judgement.

I tried to explain to her that, from a search engine point of view, it's much better to have comments on the same page, but she doesn't really care. She said that, if she wants to have comments on another page, the CMS has to allow her to do so, or she won't consider it.

While personally I don't care about this particular feature, I do think she has a point when she says she should be allowed the choice.

After all, flexibility in content publishing is what separates one CMS from another. Since I think Drupal is already several steps ahead of other CMS in this area, as I see it adding this feature would certainly help Drupal gain even more users.

Sincerely,

Anthony Brown