Comments and the Roar of the Crowd – 7

The latest from my inbox. Are readers left out by our comments system? And the perils of poor punctuation.

1. About a year ago, HonestReporting switched its comments to a Facebook-hosted system. Some readers, unfortunately, feel left behind.

From: …@gmail.com
Date: Fri, March 28, 2014
Subject: Comments

I thank your staff for giving me the ability to forward your newspapers to my contacts. However, as I have gmail, I am not able to send comments to Honest Reporting. While I used Hotmail, I had that ability. Then, Honest Reporting told me that comments could be sent only through Facebook. I had computer problems for a while, and now see that I may use various sights to post comments. However, gmail is not one of them.

Please remedy that situation.

 We used to allow free comments to everybody. Due to abusive comments and “comment-spam,” we decided to move to a subscriber-based commenting system (hosted by Facebook). It only allows registrants of Facebook, AOL, Hotmail or Yahoo to post comments. At this time, unfortunately, GMail is not compatible with the commenting system.

This new commenting system has helped us reach a wider audience on Facebook, and has significantly lowered abusive and inappropriate comments.

2. The perils of poor punctuation. I can only imagine what he or she posts on Twitter or Facebook.

From: …@gmail.com
Date: Thu, March 20, 2014
Subject: (no subject)

You donkeys are controlling everything I’m with hezbollah and eat garbage

 Uh, which of us is eating the garbage?

(Image of donkey via Wikimedia Commons/Matthias Feilhauer)