Feedback On Paged Comments Please

As some of you know I’m in the midst of getting a new theme built from scratch. Hopefully I’ll have something to share publicly soon, as I really want to get feedback from as many people as possible.

Zath has just given me some feedback on my use of Paged Comments via email which has been raised before by Daniel from DailyBlogTips:

One thing that has always puzzled me a little about your site – well it’s a minor annoyance to me anyway – why have you got the paged comments? Is it a performance thing to do with the theme? So with a new theme would it still be needed? Or is it a way of increasing page views? It just means there’s quite a few clicks to read a new comment on a post I’ve already commented on, is there a way of putting a link to the latest comment in the notification email perhaps?

I use the paged comments plugin (all the plugins I use) because I hate scrolling down posts with lots of comments, rather than as a way to increase page views. The additional page views it generates are probably minimal.

Does the paged comments annoy you? Does it stop you leaving comments? What features would make you leave more comments on the site? As a temporary move I have increased the number of comments per page from 5 to 10, but I’m happy to remove the plugin altogether.