I received this complaint today via e-mail from a would-be commenter:
When I tried to post my disappointment, as an engineer, with the ignorance
behind CAFE standards for cars, your blog blocked it. If you don’t have the
stomach for the facts, you might not be cut out to have blog.
Heavy sigh. I’ve been here so many times before. Usually, it’s somebody who writes a letter to the editor disagreeing with something we’ve said, and then calls or writes to accuse us of suppressing his opinion because it hasn’t appeared in the paper the next day — or within the next few days. FYI: We frequently have about a two-week backlog of letters we’ve approved but not run yet. We try to run them ASAP, but sometimes it takes a while. Sometimes — such as in the case of really long letters that we are reluctant to cut — it can take longer than two weeks. But we try not to let that happen.
I’ll share with you part of my response to this latest complaint, as some of the information may address a problem you have run into:
I have never blocked a single comment from my blog. I have, on
the other hand, had several of my own comments disappear when I hit the "Post"
button. And you know what I do? I don’t accuse someone of conspiring against me,
I just retype it and try again. I do something else, too — I highlight and
copy the comment several times as I write it, so that if it’s lost, I won’t have
much to retype.
An even better suggestion — write the comment on another
platform, save it, then copy it over to the blog. That way you can’t lose
it.
Ironically, sometimes when my comments fail to register and I post
them again, the second one pushes through the first, and the same comment
appears twice. I’ve noticed this has happened to a lot of people. When I
see it, I go in and delete one of them — the only way I’ve ever deleted
comments from my blog.
It’s a glitch in the TypePad software, and there’s
nothing I can do about it. This is the system with which I was provided, and I
don’t have the budget to go out and pay for a different one.
Not that a different one would solve everything, come to think of it. Stuff happens sometimes — particularly with computers. I’ve learned to save often, to avoid losing work.
One additional tip, in case you do write your comment on another platform (say, Word) and copy it over (which I would only do if the comment is long), you might want to paste it first into Notepad, then copy it from there. That washes out a lot of extraneous coding that might interfere with the way your message wraps after you post it.
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