TeleReadHello readers! At some point over the past seven or eight days, some of you may have noticed that the comments you’ve written and attempted to post to a particular article here have failed to appear. Pretty frustrating, right? Right.

But contrary to what you may have recently read on message boards or Twittter feeds elsewhere, there is not, in fact, a grand TeleRead Comments Conspiracy underway. We’re not censoring your words, readers, nor would we ever—even the mean ones that make us sad and drive us to drink.

So then, What’s the deal, you ask? The deal is this: I’ve been on vacation since last Thursday. And while the very talented and selfless Chris Meadows kindly agreed to take over the site’s editing duties while I was away, it turns out that his TeleRead account—along with the accounts of our four other main contributors—disallow him certain site privileges. One of those privileges involves—you guessed it!—the process of approving comments that have been flagged incorrectly by our content management system as spam. And truth be told, our spam filter can be very over-protective at times. Heck, sometimes it even flags my comments as spam!

TeleReadNevertheless, I fully understand the frustration of banging out a really intense comment to a blog post, clicking the “publish” button, and then … nothing. So although my vacation doesn’t technically end until Monday at 8:30 a.m., I spent the better part of my morning today scrolling through the well over 2,000 spam-flagged comments and looking for those comments that were, in fact, legitimate. I’d say I found something in the range of two-dozen real comments, and you can now find every last one of them on the site.

Now, with that said, it’s probably also worth pointing out that yes, it is possible I may have missed one or two genuine comments. So if you feel that a recent comment of yours still hasn’t been published, please go ahead and attempt to publish it once again. As always, I’ll be keeping a close eye on the site’s comments throughout the weekend, and I’ll do my best to push through any of those comments that have been incorrectly flagged as spam as soon as possible.

If you’d like, you can also feel free to email your comment to me directly after you’ve attempted to publish it, just to be doubly-sure that it doesn’t forever disappear into the murky realms of cyberspace. Please send those comments and/or notes to me at deldridge (at) napco (dot) com.

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And one other quick note: I’d like to take this opportunity to publicly offer a huge enormous colossal thank-you to Chris Meadows for taking care of business during my absence. It may not look like it to those of you who casually scan TeleRead from time to time, but there’s a ton of behind-the-scenes work that goes into maintaining a site like ours on a regular basis. Chris was tossed head-first into the fire, so to speak, on barely a moment’s notice, and he did a phenomenal job.

Indy Gen Con 2014What’s more, Chris has a full-time office job of his own; how he even manages to report and write for TeleRead as much as he does is truly beyond me. Add to that a full week of single-handedly running the editorial show here, and well … let’s just say Chris is a man who fully understands the meaning of the phrase “Protestant work ethic.”

Let’s all give Chris a very sincere (if virtual) round of applause for not allowing the site to go dark for the past week, shall we?

And finally, speaking of Chris: As he mentioned in a previous post, he’s currently in Indianapolis, Ind., covering the annual Gen Con convention for TeleRead. The event officially kicked off yesterday and runs through Sun., Aug. 18, so please stay tuned to the site for Chris’ upcoming Gen Con reports.

NO COMMENTS

  1. Agreed, Dan–about both the dedicated Chris and the nonconspiracy! You’ve both been doing a great job, along with the other regulars.

    TeleRead’s anti-spam Dobermans have been around for many years, guarding the site against an army of Viagra hucksters, but sometimes sinking their fangs into the wrong comments. It’s no small task to supervise the site’s virtual protectors, even without the time challenges that both you and Chris face. Yes, if the same technology is in use as during my time, this means YOU, Akismet.

    Happy spam warrioring,
    David

  2. Thanks for the very kind words, David. And yes, I’m sorry to confirm that Akismet is still in full force here at TeleRead HQ. Speaking of which, you probably noticed that your above comment didn’t publish right away, correct? Care to guess why? (Damn you Akismet!)

    Yes people, it’s true: The very founder of this site, David Rothman, literally cannot post a comment to the site he created without it first being caught by the spam filter, at which point it has to be found and then approved. Except for those times when his comments go through automatically, of course, which does happen on occasion.

    Why is this? I truly haven’t the foggiest of ideas. But I also suspect it’s no coincidence that my beard has much more grey in it than it did even six months ago. You’ll be the death of me, TeleRead!!

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