A note on comments

     I learned yesterday that some kind of technical problem had occurred whereby a comment apparently vanished from an earlier post. The commenter was quite naturally concerned that their words had been edited, but in the end we discovered that it was gremlins who were at fault, not me!

     I feel, though, that a word on the subject is in order. Only twice have I deleted a comment. The first occasion was an example of blatant self-promotion on the part of the commenter and was completely irrelevant to the post in question. The second time - rather more serious - was when a commenter (who'd clearly arrived here by way of a name search) cited an article about someone I'd referred to in a post. This article was misleading, ill-informed and based on malicious gossip; it was at best a slight to its subject and at worst libellous. I happen to know the person who was being attacked and could not let a reference of that nature stand on my site.

     Minor editing has taken place on two other occasions: once - at the behest of the commenter - to correct a typing error, and once to delete a remark which had gone a little too far off topic and which - again - the commenter herself asked me to remove. Otherwise, everything appears exactly as it was written.

    However, as we saw yesterday, technical problems do occur. I know that some readers cannot comment at all and they contact me by direct email when they have something to say. At other times comments do not 'go through' successfully and may not appear on the post, or they are mysteriously duplicated, in which case I delete the superfluous ones. Until recently it was my policy to reply directly to every comment I received, but two things make that difficult now. One is time constraints, but more relevant is the fact that though I should get every comment as a direct email, in practice I do not. This means I don't always know a comment has arrived  - though I usually do discover it later - and replying to it is a cumbersome procedure.

    The comments I get here are overwhelmingly positive, pleasant and help make the site what it is, so they are very important to me. I hope that they will keep on coming, and that readers will understand that I exercise my editorial prerogative in that respect only if something is offensive or inappropriate. Gremlins, however, are beyond my control!

Comments

[Simon]

It's so true - comments are what make blogging special for me. Though blogger, sadly, doesn't give me contact info for comment-writers, and thus I can't reply properly. Replying on my own blog feels a little self-involved...!

[Elaine]

For some reason I kept being visited by a person extolling the pleasures of perfrum and obviously trying to sell something. This happened so often that I had him added to my block list. I have also had the odd unpleasant and snide comment which I delete immediately. I should add that none of my regular commentators leave unpleasant comments at all, this was somebody I had never heard of and when I wrote and told her off she vanished into the blogsphere. I LOVE reading my comments from my visitors, it makes my day.

[Simon]

An addendum to my comment - I have one person who (anonymously) left a few unkind comments. I mentioned the fact that it was hurtful about a month ago, and haven't had anything since... so here's hoping they've seen the error of their ways! How Dickensian...