Anatomy of a Comment Form

A quick tour of how it works.

This one’s for all you lurkers out there. Lord knows I have a ton of them. Below is a copy of my comment form. Isn’t it pretty? 🙂 Looks pretty basic, doesn’t it? Honestly, there is nothing to be afraid of here.

First of all, let’s talk about the name. You can put anything in there, and I won’t mind. If you look too much like spam – and anything having to do with “performance enhancement” or that has the word “diet” in it looks like spam – then I can’t promise to fish you out of my spam filter.

BTW, if you have a “gravatar” (one of those picture thingies) then I’m a lot more likely to spot you in the deluge and pull you out when Akemet gets too aggressive.

If you’ve left a comment and it never appeared (it should show up right away) then email me at AliceAudreyJ at yahoo dot com so I’ll watch for you. That screening business can start a vicious cycle, so it’s worth contacting me.

On to email. Yes, you do have to put something in there. It must have the @ sign and a .com or .net or whatever at the end. My blog program doesn’t bother to check if it’s real. The only way I will find out is if you win one of my contests or make a particularly interesting comment so that I am overwhelmed with the need to contact you. That overwhelming thing doesn’t happen much because frankly, I already get more than enough email.

For those of you still waiting for a reply in email correspondence, I am so sorry. I really will answer at some point. Um… if it’s been more than six weeks, you might want to remind me.

About the Website, this is an optional and entertaining thing. Honest. You can toy with me through this field because of how I use it. The blog program automatically turns your name into a hyperlink. I am quite devoted to clicking those links to return any visits I receive. This can send me on a wild goose chase.

For instance, there is one person who visits here fairly often who puts her email where the website is supposed to be. The result is that every time I click on her name to go visit her site, I get sent to a page asking me for her password to get into her email account. It drives me batty.

Other people (quite a few) have put links to specific blog posts so that I am constantly sent to the same specific post and must hunt down the button to take me to the main loop of the blog. In one case this has been going on for two years.

I’d fix it for people if I could, but the auto-fill function is on YOUR computer, not mine.

I’ve had people send me to different specific posts with each comment (which is fun as long as it doesn’t get stuck on something) or to unrelated web sites. I don’t mind, but if the web site doesn’t look like it has anything specifically to do with you, don’t expect me to respond, and be aware I might start thinking you’re spamming me.

The Big Blue Blank comes next. Yeah, it looks white until you click it then turns blue. I flipped the wrong switch somewhere in my CSS code, and haven’t figured out where to switch it back. Just go ahead and type your comment. It’ll work.

You’re welcome to make it as long or short as you please. The only time I’ve deleted a comment is if I thought it was spam or it included something that really, really shouldn’t be there. I even have heckling comments still left on Suzie’s House posts. This is one case where saying something that isn’t nice is better than holding your tongue.

Go ahead. Leave a comment. If you don’t want me to follow you to your own blog, simply leave out the website part of the form. I won’t send you unwanted email or hunt you down. It’s perfectly safe. And you know I loooooove comments.