I’ve Been a Bad, Bad Host…

I had a hard time deciding the title of this post… it was either this or “It’s official… I’m an Idiot!”

The reason for this self deprecation you ask? 2 words: Unmoderated Comments. For months now I’ve been wondering why I wasn’t getting any comments to my blog posts. I couldn’t figure it out. I have good traffic (about 3k uniques a day), decent content, acceptable design & usability, etc. Although I thought about it often, I usually passed it off as one (or all) of three possibilities:

1) I assumed that since most of my traffic arrives via the search engines, I wasn’t getting the commenting type of visitors. Primarily folks looking for images of dogs, monsters, roses and such and weren’t real impressed with what they saw. So zip… to the back button they went.

2) I figured no one has time to post comments anymore, especially on a sketchblog. It’s not like the blogosphere’s tripling every three seconds or anything. Not to mention the tons of new highly talented artist & illustrators that have started blogging recently. Market saturation?

3) I then thought my advertising was possibly offending people. This was maybe the most irrational and borderline paranoid theory of the bunch because everyone advertises these days. Working freelance secluded from the rest of the world does that kind of thing to a person.

I even made sure the functionality wasn’t broken by testing the comments myself and yep, no problems. It never dawned on me that a comment from myself on my own site would not require approval before showing up on the site because it’s smart enough to know it’s my own blog. And there lies the issue folks. I had my blog options set so I had to approve comments manually before they would show up on the site. (doh!) On top of that, I had “unchecked” the email notification option that sends me email whenever a new comment is awaiting moderation! (double doh!)

So today after browsing a bunch of cool illustration sites that had comments all over them, it finally dawned on me to go check out the admin area… you know, just in case. And there they were. Over 1500 comments in the moderation area waiting in limbo for God knows how long… I thought my browser was going to crash it took so long to load.

I don’t have a firm grasp of how long this has been going on because WordPress doesn’t tell you the date the comment was written. I’m guessing 7-8 months at least. So I’m obviously kicking myself for not checking this out sooner. I must have messed with the options some late night working through a deadline, finally fed up with comment spam for good so I just flicked the switch and forgot all about it.

I’m telling you, you haven’t lived until you’ve had to sit for over an hour sifting through 1500 comments, weeding out the spam and crap from legit, insightful, and sometimes even flattering messages. I guess if there’s something that’ll help me learn a lesson, this was it. Out of all those comments there were probably around 300 real comments that are now all posted to the site throughout it’s 200+ posts.

So everything is back to normal, whatever that means. I’ve installed Spam Karma 2 on the site so I’m confident I won’t ever have to deal with this issue again.

On a positive note, as I was going through the comments I felt a great sense of appreciation from all the wonderful and insightful words people wrote when I thought no one was interested. I want to thank everyone who took the time to post comments here on the blog, and I apologize if I seemed like a snob by not responding to your thoughts… quite the contrary. Knowing the importance of participating in comment conversation on your own blog, I’ll do my best to address as many old comments over time, as well as any new ones.

*in your best Napoleon Dynamite voice*
IDIOT!