A Comment on Comments

I just found out last week that "comments" weren't working.

A friend told me she'd commented on my last post but they never showed up.  I asked if anybody else had had trouble, and another friend told she had also tried to comment, but her comment, an entire paragraph, disappeared!

There hadn't been any comments but I hadn't been surprised by that.  I have gotten a few but most people who had something to say seemed to prefer to say it on Facebook.  That is, when I posted my blog entries on Facebook.  I had been writing about politics and religion; some of the posts I hadn't even been putting on Facebook.  My followers being few (but select), I had gotten used to there not being comments.

On my recent series, though, I had thought there could be comments.  The series was what some would consider controversial, so I turned on the "moderate" function.  I thought that would give me a chance to think through replies.  And if there were replies that got nasty (not from my friends, of course), I'd have a choice about whether to publish them.  I think that's how it works.

Now it turns out there have been comments.  People bothered to write them up and then they were lost in cyberspace.  Oh, no!

The comments, not the people, but that's bad enough.

On investigating it turned out I had "word verification" turned on.  That's where the commenter has to copy a strange series of case-sensitive letters or numbers of varying degrees of legibility.  It's supposed to keep out spam, but the "help" response tells me there are better "spam filters" these days so it's not really necessary.  That may have been the culprit.  Turned it off!

I also turned off the "moderator" function.  That means that comments will show up right away.  I haven't had a problem so far.  Maybe I was borrowing trouble.  Anyway, right now, losing the comments is the larger problem.  We'll see.  I don't care for those situations where respondents get into polemical free-for-alls with each other.  There's enough nastiness in the world.  But as I said, so far that's not the problem.  I should be so lucky as to have great numbers of respondents!

There is one thing I do worry about, though, and that's the fact I'm concerned my responses to comments won't be as good as the original posts.  The posts themselves are the result of turning things over and over.  They take me a while.  I'm learning as I write.  I try to tell "just the truth, ma'am."  I try to get the defensiveness out, and I try to get the gratuitous pokes at other people or groups out.  In responding to comments I might not do so well.

So here's my plan.  I may not respond instantly.  It may even take a day or two.  Also, I am going to remember to look at the responding as part and parcel of my learning process.  That means the commenter may be my teacher.  But more likely it'll be the dialogue itself that will be the source of learning.

After all, it is anyway.  Dialogue has provided my stimulus and raw material.

Okay, then!  Comments, ready or not!