Saturday, August 19, 2006

Comments have now been turned off

Note: this post has been superseded. Comments have been turned back on.

I had in a previous post announced that comment moderation had been turned on.

I had assumed that I would received from Blogger notification of any comments pending moderation, as I used to receive on my Yahoo list.

When I received no such notification, I assumed that there had been no comments.

However, only tonight for the first time I noticed a "Moderate Comments" tag, and on clicking on it I found a page full of notifications of pending comments. Most of them were from the time-waster I mentioned when I turned comments moderation on. After rejecting those and reading a few others of what I considered to be low quality, I felt it would be a waste of time responding to them.

There were probably some good quality comments that I did not read, but before I got to them, I realised that just don't have time to do justice to comments (it takes me all my spare time to research and publish my blog posts and write my book).

Unfortunately I found that Blogger only gave me two choices: Reject or Publish, not a third Delete. Yet, after reading some of the comments, I found I had dilemma: I did not want to publish them and then feel I had to respond to them, which would waste my already scarce time, but if I rejected them it would probably cause hurt feelings.

So I decided to cut my losses and turn comments off, which I now have done. I had thought that Blogger would then remove the comments screen, but it didn't, so I then rejected all those that were left.

My apologies to those who posted comments (even the time-waster), before I belatedly realised that Blogger was not notifying me of them.

Stephen E. Jones, BSc (Biol).
`Evolution Quotes Book'