Every so often, I get an email that says “where did my comment go” or something vaguely like that. A few words of explanation:
All comments are moderated — nothing is visible online until I decide it is, and I almost always edit the comments a bit before posting them.
When you submit a comment, the software running this site “knows” that it’s yours and the comment is visible in your current session. However, when you come back later (especially if you’re not on the same computer), the system has no way of knowing who you are and your comment vanishes. You are a new user to the system, and so the comment is hidden.
There is a continuous problem with spam (yes, spammers know how to post to Blogs) and I don’t want any of that showing up online. Some is trapped and purged, but some evades the filters and I have to delete it manually.
Some comments are, shall we say, a tad incendiary and suggest that the parentage of various politicos may be suspect (those are the mild ones) or even that they might have just a tiny conflict of interest. While I might agree, I want this site to deal with transit, not with political mudslinging, and I also don’t want the world to think I concur with some of the sleazier comments by posting them. Anyone who runs a Blog goes through the same thing, and some people turn comments off for just that reason (as I did when this site was getting started).
Some times, I hang onto comments for a while letting a group of related topics build up if they are worth a post of their own. Some times I just tire of the same arguments back and forth. It is my site, after all, and if someone wants to advocate some other grand scheme for transit, they can set up shop too. Meanwhile, some readers have started to comment on each other’s hobby-horses, and that’s a good sign that it’s time to change the subject.
Thanks to everyone who does write. I really do read them all, and post most of them even if I don’t always agree. The debates about transit issues are complex and it’s worth hearing different points of view.
Now I’m going back to working on Film Festival reviews.