quite interesting...i would say Slashdot has more commenters than Digg. But most of that is spam.

Not really a contender, but a thread on John Wiseman's "most Lisp weblog" about programming-for-love vs. programming for-money has almost 800 comments (http://lemonodor.com/archives/000520.html). But because the title is "Like Beyoncé and Jay-Z," it's gone on over 2 1/2 years with a typical comments being "i think beyonce suck she toke all tina tuner moves and uses them as her own. she took tina tuner leg works and the flipping of her hair.be original beyonce be original" and "i think that most of the stuff some people said about beyonce is definitly wrong and creul. she did not steel anybody moves (tina tuner). whoever said that is just a plain old hater."

It probably shouldn't count, but the Engadget Mobile cell phone giveaway posts have thousands of comments. Here's one with 5,529.

The archives aren't available anymore, but what about the Democratic Party blog on the days leading up to the election? I'm sure their commenting was out of control.

...and I suppose having comments enabled for this one is something of a punchline?

I was always amazed by the number of comments Zach Braff's Garden State blog got. Not a contender either, but here's a post with 3622 comments.

This is pretty fucking classic.

The forum on DPReview.com actually limits the amount of posts per thread to just 150 posts.
There is probably a technical reason why they have imposed this limit, but the interesting thing is, it has a nice side effect.
In almost all cases, all the interesting points and discussions happen in the first 50 posts.
Threads that do grow larger are almost always repetitions of the same points by people who don't bother reading 50+ posts and endless discussions/flames by stuborn posters who aren't willing to give in.
The limit is a nice way of stopping such run away threads.

The EngadgetMobile home page says 9580 comments for its cell phone giveaway post even as I write this post. Just for kicks go over this and read its comments. Its a laugh riot.

You gotta wonder if someone associated with those sites had to read them all.

I'm "commented out" after 200 or so post comments. 5687? That's just nuts.

I don't know if it counts as a blog, but Fark had the infamous "I saw a turtle" thread that was active for about 2 years until it was finally killed by the mods. But it was kinda stealth... I think the Oscar thread this month was around 3500 comments.

Oooh...BTW, does anyone truly know the longest USENET thread ever? You'd think Google should be able to figure it out. Maybe Kibo or an ol' alt.cascade net.legend could tell us.

Posts to official LiveJournal communities regulary get thousands of comments. 4998, 5000. Some infamous posts there have seen a big response too: ea_spouse's whistleblowing on EA's treatment of developers saw 4488.

But I think we have a winner: The "marriage is love" post that started the colorbar craze got 11007 comments and apparently hit LJ's hard limit.

Woops. Closing tags are overrated anyhow.

Shacknews threads frequently get 2000+

by asking this question are you too shooting for over 1k comments?

The Aquafag thread, about Marky Mark's rumor to being cast in an Aquaman movie, generated over 5000 posts (the last I remember). Since the top posts for the last 24 hours show up on the site, the Talkbackers kept this thread in the top spot for weeks. Ultimately it had to be renamed to throw them off the scent.

Don't forget Usenet.

Oops, I'm sorry, you already have.

I don't know about the most amount of comments, but italian Beppe Grillo' blog has certainly the highest AVERAGE amount.

That sure is a lot of comments. If we continue to argue wheather it is a good idea to go for the maximum number of comments record...we might end up creating the record here itself...

I was going to mention Beppe Grillo too. He's a veritable single-person mass medium. When we released retrievr, a link on Beppe Grillo's weblog resulted in _way_ more traffic than Digg's frontpage, del.icio.us/popular &c.

My comment on your Matrix blog has been steadily generating traffic for some reason. And now you go link to it again?

Not the longest thread, but this has been nominated as the single longest comment.

on ilm there is a dave matthews thread which broke 5000

Kids who are big fans of The School of Rock movie use the comments area on my School of Rock Super Fan Weblog like a group chat area, asking each other if they are online.

The Kevin Alexander Clark's Got A Web Site post has 3,389 comments.

Totally crazy.

The perpetual drinking thread at the Ars Technica Lounge forum has 7,598 replies.

not that it's a blog per se, but the fan forum at janetjackson.com has 60.596 posts in one thread :
http://janetjackson.emiforums.com/index.php?showtopic=305383

one can yap about the separatism of blogs to forums, crowds and feeds and such.. but whats really the point? its all (one way) communication.

Zach Braff regularly has sup-1000 comment posts. Like This one for example.

ooops... rtfc!

and the 'MTQ super thread' at same forum has 277.546 posts.
you talking software scaling, kottke, or is it happygopost-meta-ish-blogonly?

The blog post for the local Pennsbury school district strike on phillyBurbs.com got 16,762 comments before we shut it off.

http://blogs.phillyburbs.com/blog.php?p=2936

Huffington Post tops out at 2759 for a news story and 1333 for a blog post.

You mentioned a forum. What about GAIA? I just surfed around for a few min. and found this thread that has 1,604,349 replies

I don't know what the record is, but I'm doing my bit now to make this thread the longest in history.

an italian information blog written by Beppe Grillo (an italian comedian) gets very often 1000+ comments on his articles, written more or less daily.

Crazy Apple Rumors (www.crazyapplerumors.com) has a post (colloquially referred to as the Mega-Post) that had over 1000 comments.

What interests me, Jason, is how you as a blogger deal with so many comments to one post. you obviously can't read them all. is there a waypoint where comments lose their meaning and weight just because there's too many of them?

The record on Apple Matters is 230 for a story on what What OS X could learn from windows. What is interesting is that a number of our top commented stories are about windows!

Another comment on comment amount. I would judge it by not only the number but the quality and interaction. My favorite thing is when I come across a story on a blog whose comments are far longer, and add more to the question than the original poster could ever have imagined.

Would it have been ironic or coincedental if this became the most commented thread?

Quantity at its finest, but is the quality there? Spam can transform any site into the next breeding ground for 1000+ comments. Dooce.com is probably the most commented site with relevant meaty responses and an enforced Typekey identity.

Not quite up with the rock stars, but my old post on Doctor Who and "Bad Wolf" has (so far) 1343 comments - and no doubt will have more when the Americans get excited about the series.

Over at PoopReport.com, 780 people have commented about what makes their poop turn green. (Blue dye!)

I'd also be interested in the blog post with the highest comments per minute-ratio, even if that's of no apparent use.

Damn! I thought one of the popular threads on (one of) my blogs had generated lot of comments but there are several biggies out there. That Italian guy sure is amazing but most of his audience seems to be Italian because his same posts in English hardly get any comments.

http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/index.php? ... the largest forums online, have a number of threads over 140,000 replies. 5000 reply threads are routine there.

Er, though, the above is a forum, not a blog.

What is more interesting is what person or thing in "real life" has got the most comments. This would probably be someone like Bootsy Collins, or maybe a thing like Stonehenge. For hundred of years, people have comented, "oh what an unusual agglomeration of stones", and "I love your rhinestone glasses". Then again, it could be something like the sky.

But if you account for time something has existed, a posts-per-year measure, say, then the winner's probably the post about how bad the Dave Matthews Band is.

What is more interesting is what person or thing in "real life" has got the most comments.

Reminds me of an old AskMeFi question: what's the most photographed thing ever?

Celtic Quick News, a blog about Celtic Football Club in Glasgow, Scotland regularly notches up 300+ comments per entry, per day - often more.

This entry here, when Celtic (one of the biggest soccer team in Scotland, if not the UK) were beaten 2-1 by a lower-division side in the Scottish Cup earlier this year, notched up 1,327 comments:

http://www.celticquicknews.co.uk/2006/01/celtic-report-for-duty-unprepared-for.shtml

It's really tough to explain to people unfamiliar with blogs that the best content can often reside in the comments. A well moderated blog with a good following is so much more than a one-way conversation.

Ed,

Right, but you get less in a way too. After all, if you spend 30 minutes reading one comment thread, you don't have those 30 minutes to read 5 other blogs.

Ed and Eric -- both valid points. I wish more blogs had some sort of a comment rating system... something like slashdot. Comments on many blogs are often more valuable than the actual posts, but there's too much noise for most people to sort it out.

Solutions? I suppose the users could vote.

One method I think would be nice would be for the blog owner to select a few of the best comments for each entry as the best. These "best" comments would then be moved to the top of the comments, so that future visitors would find them straight away. Would be a lot of work for the site operator, but would certainly be nice.

Completely unrelated... why do people comment on posts that already have thousands of comments? What's the point? Perhaps it's the same motivation as people who submit the 500th review of something on Amazon.

I really don't know, but I'll echo another commenter that the greatest irony was to see this at the foot of the post in my RSS reader:

(with comments)

Loves it.

Blogcritics has a few (6) articles with more than 1000 comments. The longest has only 3440 comments, though. The biggest problem is how to display them all on one page. With the current CSS design, the pages take forever to load, though they could probably handle 10,000 more comments if it were not for that.

The sad part is that the number one article is about Pretty Ricky.

My personal record (on my site) is eight. Sadly, it was the post where I asked people to comment, so it probably doesn't count. And several of them are just me.

The archives aren't available anymore, but what about the Democratic Party blog on the days leading up to the election?

Hydrogenaudio.org--a forum not a blog--has a thread
discussing what people are listening to, and it has been alive since 2002. Good ol' aught-2.

Good point Linda

Reminds me of the time eons ago when we first got e-mail at work, and decided to see how many times we could reply back and forth to one another. I believe it was 600-something before the e-mail administrator caught on and made us knock it off.

At some point there's a diminishing return, isn't there? Who would scroll through and read thousands of comments?