Are comments a necessary part of audience engagement or just too much work to moderate? Swift newspapers dropped comments in the spring and has announced that they won’t be coming back any time soon.Randy Bagert, editor of Swift’s Greeley (CO) Tribune announced the comment ‘pause’ last April by saying, “Why don’t we just delete the worst of the comments, you ask? Well, we can. But it takes too much time to monitor.” At the time, he said discontinuing comments was just a test.This week The Digital Test Kitchen reports that it is working on a test project with Swift and the Tribune research project “to devise ways to rein in the sometimes-ugly and nasty nature of user comments on newspaper websites.” “Swift will not revive user comments on its newspapers’ websites until the company decides on and implements a new content management system (CMS) to serve all the sites.” The new CMS will not be implemented until 2012 or 2013.Can a newspaper truly be part of the community dialogue without comments? (Some would argue the Letter to the Editor is still a viable option.) Or do busy site staffs simply not have the time for comment moderation?