Contact me at lucyvictoriabrown@gmail.com because I'm always up for a natter about anything. Well, mostly.

Tuesday 25 January 2011

Comment Control

Recently I posted a perfectly good-natured comment on the bottom of a historical blog entry only to find the next day that it had been removed. Now, there could be all sorts of reasons for the disappearance - maybe I wasn't as articulate as I presumed, maybe I made a glaring mistake in the response that made both me and the owner look stupid, or maybe there was a glitch with the page and my comment didn't save.

It could be any of the above really but the notion that my comment might have been deliberately deleted by the blog owner baffled me a little. I pretty much bowed to his superior wisdom and let it be known that he'd taught me something. I would've thought all bloggers liked hearing that.

Generally, I don't remove any comments from anything. On this blog I've been happy to converse with the lovely people who have stopped by and on my other blog, the political Rattling Marbles, I've received one comment only. Now I didn't deliberately intend to ignore that response to one of my posts - I hadn't got to grips with the comment alert feature at the time and subsequently didn't notice it for about a month. It's sad really because I would've liked to engage the reader in some lively debate but the time had passed for that. Even so, the comment remains there on the blog, a blip on my authority as blog owner. But whether it's favourable or not, it at least proves that post stimulated some kind of debate with someone. I'm happy for that.

Do you regularly delete comments from your blog?

3 comments:

Diane said...

Some of my comments have been disappearing recently, but I think it's between me commenting and me forgetting to do the word captchya. On My blog the captchya appears at the same time as the comment(s), but on newer blogs (like this one) a new window is opened AFTER the comment is posted. It's caught me out a few times, but since I noticed, I've not noticed any comments disappearing.

Regarding comment removal, however, yes I do it. I've done it when exes have posted embarrassing or plain rude comments, and I've done it when it's obviously spam. I've taken the captchya off mine now, but removed the option for anonynmous comments. I get a lot less spam so there's less need for the captchya.

If I delete a comment for any other reason, either on my blog, on Facebook, or on my guestbook, I usually tell the person why first.

Diane said...

Sorry for the typos ... :-/

CharmedLassie said...

Like I said, I may just be being paranoid about this particular comment. It's just made me quite reluctant to respond to anything on that blog again - in case I'm being monitored!

Telling people why is a very good idea of yours. So far I haven't had any embarrassing or rude comments to worry about but I probably would have to delete those I think.