A brief note on comments
By Hilary White
If you leave a comment and it doesn’t appear, it’s usually going to be because of the moderation process, which consists mainly of me scrolling as rapidly as possible through the hundreds and hundreds of spams, clicking “Approve” when I spot one that looks like a real comment and bulk-dumping the rest at the end of each page. 20 messages per page. It’s a pretty annoying method, and takes up an annoying amount of time, but Disqus was just a pain, and I couldn’t figure out how to turn off their obnoxious adverts that appeared on the bottom of the page. So it’s this or no comments at all.
This means, I take not much more than about a quarter of a second to glance at it to see if it’s a real comment. Even if it’s a negative comment, I usually approve them. The only negative comments I dump are the ones that are outright abusive or embarrassingly insane, or just incomprehensible. If I can’t figure out what you’re trying to say, your mission to insult me has failed.
It also means that if you write me some long thing with a little note at the end saying, “Don’t publish this, I just wanted to express myself to you,” you’re just going to get put instantly into the “dump” pile. If you want to “express” yourself to me, send me an email. Or text me on Facebook or Twitter or something.
I do usually stop and read most of the comments that look worth reading, but the time I have to judge that is infinitesimally small, so inevitably some comments are going to get lost. Sorry.
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