In short, anyone can comment. WordPress holds comments for approval if you haven’t submitted one before (”you” being defined as a combination of an IP address and a username/email set), and given that you’re a person reading this, your comments will be approved, whether we agree with them or not, as soon as the system notifies us that the comment exists (usually within 30 minutes), assuming they have content. Example:
CONTENT: “Stewart, that post is great, you’re 100% correct”
CONTENT: “Stewart, that post is unbelievably stupid, I can’t even understand it, and where did you get your facts, the Forest Preserve outhouse?”
CONTENT: “the prblm herr is the az-5 button was pressed out of sequeenc”
NOT CONTENT: “BUY CH33P PILL$ 0NLINE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
NOT CONTENT: “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA”
If you don’t know whether your comment meets these standards, assume it does. Really. We haven’t yet deleted a comment that was saying something.
We used to leave a notice that a comment was deleted whenever we would delete a spam comment, in the spirit of openness. We don’t do that any more, largely because it sent the message that we were trigger-happy and would delete comments that upset our artistic vision for the page (that’s Greenpeace’s attitude, not ours), but also because WordPress doesn’t have such a message.
Also, as of this writing, there are roughly 20,000 spam comments on the old Blogger-based blog, which we’re trying to delete so that we can import the rest of the comments. As far as we can tell, the number of comments dropped in the transfer from Blogger to WordPress was about 10-20, but we won’t know until we’ve deleted all the spam, and since Blogger doesn’t have a bulk removal tool, getting there is going to take a little while. We’ll update this page, and post a notice, when we do.
If you want us to delete one of your comments, please email us from the same address you used in the comment form. We’ll honor your request unless someone has responded to it, and we’ll always honor requests to correct typos (with a note added at the bottom if someone has referred to the typo).
On a technical note, sometimes there may be server errors. WordPress is very reliable, and so is our host (Bravenet), and we don’t know of any server errors involving this system ever having occurred, but just to be safe, we recommend copying the text of your comment until WordPress confirms that it has received it.
Basically, we want your comments, and we want to encourage you to comment. Jump right in!
Please also feel free to register at our discussion board.
This page was written by Stewart Peterson on May 17, 2009
