Keep those cards and letters coming!

We love hearing from you guys—really love it. Hearing your thoughts, questions, suggestions and even complaints is the absolute best part of blogging here.

When we first started Born to Learn last fall, it felt very much like we were talking into the ether, but now it feels much more like an ongoing dialogue.

That said—we hear from you guys a lot… we have 2,288 comments just since we launched this new site in May—not even three months ago! (and another 1500+ comments on our old Technet blog).

So I thought it might be helpful—to both you and us—to give some useful info and suggestions on how to ensure your comment gets read and responded to.

Why Your Comment May Not Get Noticed

Because we have so many authors here, and because we get so many comments, each author only gets notified of comments left on articles he or she posted. So if you ask a question directed at me in a comment attached to a post of Sarah’s, odds are I may not notice it. If you leave a comment for me on one of my own threads, however, I have no one to hide behind. :-)

Exception/Full Disclosure: there are a few of us who do receive every comment left on the blog (Dana, Joanne, myself, and a few others), but mostly that’s so we can ensure that no inappropriate comments are getting by. We tend to focus on our own articles when it comes to substantive review.

…which leads me to:

Why Your Comment May Not Show Up… or Why It May Quickly Disappear

We have a pretty strong spam filter—very little gets by it. (So far today, I can see it’s caught a couple of offers for payday loan advances, Viagra, “gay movies,” and something called Lortab, which I assume is some kind of pharmaceutical, and we’re inclined to spare you from those rather off-topic subjects.)  Sometimes, however, our spam filter catches legitimate comments, and since we don’t make the software ourselves (we run on WordPress), I really can’t tell you why that happens. What I can tell you is that we don’t censor comments unless one of three conditions are true:

1) Your comment includes an obscenity, even if disguised with strategically placed asterisks. And yes, I know standards of acceptability vary wildly around the world, but that’s precisely the issue: we have a global readership. I don’t pretend for a minute to have some kind of objective table of forbidden words or phrases. We use our own judgment here, so my best advice is to simply steer clear of using words that you think might offend someone somewhere.

2) Your comment includes confidential information, copyrighted material, or references to illegal sites (for example, braindump sites), for rather obvious reasons.

3) Your comment includes personal attacks against someone—doesn’t matter if that person is another reader/commenter, one of our authors, one of our executives, or even (and I’ve had to delete a few of these) the President of the United States. There’s simply no call to impugn someone’s character—we certainly give you guys plenty of ammunition for intellectual debates without any of us needing to go down that road. :-)

…but we never, ever, ever, ever delete a comment just because it’s negative or critical, if it doesn’t also meet one of the above criteria.

Why Your Comment May Not Get Answered

So if you leave a comment for the right person on the right thread, and it’s not in the least bit naughty or disrespectful, why might you still not get an answer?

1) We might have already answered that question earlier in the thread (or in a previous article, if this was a follow-up article). Do a search through the comments, and you might find your answer. To manage our workloads (we all have day jobs other than posting here), we tend not to respond to repeated questions but rather assume that you’ll find the answer elsewhere in the thread (or that another reader will point out the answer to you).

2) We might be waiting on a reply to an expert to whom we forwarded the question. Give us a couple of business days from the time you posted before asking again.

3) We might have exhausted what we can contribute to the conversation. Sometimes, you may not be satisfied with the answer we give, but it’s the only one we have. In such cases, we state specifically that it’s time to move on, and if you continue to pursue the conversation… well, we’ve moved on.

4) We might be deliberately ignoring you. Hopefully, this will never happen to you—so far, there’s only one reader who we’ve decided to simply ignore all comments from, and only because he has flat out told us that he wouldn’t believe us and doesn’t trust us anyway, so why bother? We have a baseline expectation here that we all treat each other with respect and assume honesty and positive intent. If you go so far as to tell us that you think we’re bad, dishonest people and rate every single post on the blog with one star, there’s really no reason or incentive for us to talk to you anymore—you wouldn’t believe or appreciate any information we provided.

(BTW, I’m not mentioning this reader by name, and I’d appreciate you not cluing him into this, because our success here is measured in some part by the amount of traffic we get, and every time he posts a comment, we get eyeballs. In other words, he’s actually helping us, and I think it might cause him emotional distress if he knew that. Shh!)

Finally, if none of the above applies, and you still haven’t got an answer, we might be on vacation, in training, sick (this is especially likely if you haven’t seen a post from that author since) or I guess we just screwed up and missed it. It happens. Feel free to ask again, we don’t mind. :-)