See which posts actually draw discussion

CommentsBeginner~10 min

Before you start

A connected site with the post-list and comment reads enabled. No moderation ability is needed, and none is used, so this works from a read-only agent connection.

Every content plan runs on a hunch about what your readers care about. Traffic numbers tell you what people clicked, which is not the same thing. Comments tell you what people cared enough to type a reply about, and that signal is sitting in your database already, spread across hundreds of individual posts where nobody ever looks at it as a whole.

This prompt gathers it up. It reads a set of posts you name, reads the approved comments on each, and reports where the actual conversation lives. It changes nothing and moderates nothing.

The prompt
Show me which of my posts actually draw discussion. Read only, change nothing,
and do not moderate anything.
Start by listing [my last thirty published posts] with their titles and
publication dates. Then read the approved comments on each of those posts in
turn.
Rank the posts by how much genuine discussion each one drew, and for the top
few, tell me what the conversation is actually about: questions people keep
asking, disagreements, requests for something you do not cover yet. Then show
me the posts that drew nothing at all.
Be explicit about the sample. Tell me how many posts you covered and how many
comments you read across them, so I know the ranking is about those posts and
not my whole archive. Finish with what this suggests I should write more of.

Why this is safe to run

Both abilities are reads. Listing posts and reading a post’s approved comments report what is already published and cannot approve, edit, trash, or reply to anything. The moderation ability that could act on a comment is a separate switch this recipe never asks for, so a read-only agent connection runs this fine.

Two honest notes on the method, because how the read works decides how far the answer reaches. There is no site-wide comment feed to pull: the comment read works one post at a time, so the agent walks the list of posts you gave it and the ranking covers exactly that list. Name your last thirty posts and you learn about those thirty. It is a survey the agent assembles post by post, not a leaderboard you could look up. And it reads approved comments only, which means a post drowning in unmoderated spam reads as quiet here. If your queue is backed up, clear it first with the triage the comment queue recipe and run this after, or the picture will be wrong in a way that looks perfectly reasonable.

Privacy needs no configuring here. Comment reads never hand back an email address or an IP, so the report is built from author names, content, and timing, and nothing personal leaks into your chat window. Every call runs against the capability of the user you bound the agent to and lands in the Activity Log.

Already connected? Skip the paste. Ask your agent for the “see which posts actually draw discussion” recipe, or just ask which of your recent posts got people talking, and it runs the same reads against your own site.

How it works

  1. List the posts you want covered, with their titles and publication dates.
  2. Read the approved comments on each of those posts in turn.
  3. Rank the posts by how much real discussion each one drew.
  4. Note what the conversation on the busiest posts is actually about.
  5. Call out the posts that drew nothing, and say how the sample was scoped.

Questions

Does this approve, delete, or reply to anything?
No. Both abilities are reads, and the moderation ability is not part of this recipe. It reads posts and their approved comments and reports what it found. Approving, replying, or trashing a comment is a separate ability with its own switch.
Does it cover my whole archive?
Only if you scope it that way, and this is the method limit worth knowing. The comment read works one post at a time, so the agent walks the list of posts you name rather than pulling a site-wide feed. Ask for your last thirty posts and you get an honest answer about those thirty, not about everything you have ever published.
Will it show me commenters' email addresses?
No. Comment reads never return the commenter's email address or IP, by design. You get the author name, the content, and the timing, which is everything this report needs and nothing it does not.
What about the spam sitting in my moderation queue?
It is not in this picture. This reads approved comments only, so a post buried in unmoderated junk looks quiet here rather than busy. The pending queue is a different ability, and triaging it is its own recipe.