Big Bad Booboo On Publishing Blog Comments

 Awhile back Google overhauled their Blogger application with which I do the blogging thing. The changes took some getting used to.

One of the changes I had not noticed was the item you can see via the above screen cap. On the left you see a column. There are two items in that column that are orange. The one we are interested in is the second orange item.

Comments

Previously if I clicked "Comments" a sub-menu would open showing the options of "Published", "Awaiting Moderation" and "Spam".

Previously if I clicked "Comments" I would see those sub-menu options, with the "Awaiting Moderation" option telling me the number of comments waiting to be moderated.

So, a couple days ago I clicked "Comments" and saw there was no longer those aforementioned sub-menu options. It took me way too long to figure out I now had to click in another location to see those sub-menu options, only to find myself mortified to see there were dozens of comments awaiting being moderated.

Some of those commenters repeated their comments when they did not see them published. And then followed that with comments asking what does one have to do to make a comment on the Durango blog.

I have now hit the publish button on those comments that had been waiting to be moderated. Well, almost all of them. There were a couple which were examples of why one moderates such things.

Another thing Google did, which helped cause me this mortification, is previously comments were sent by Google to the primary email tab in Gmail. I have now learned Google sends comments to the social email tab.

I had wondered a time or two why comments seemed to have dried up, but did not spend much time wondering about it. I figured I had just grown boring and non-controversial, so no one felt compelled to give me a piece of their mind.

Looking at the stats Google includes in the Blogger Dashboard, I was surprised to see that during the long long time this blog has existed there have been slightly over 7,500 comments.

I would not have guessed the number to be so high. 

Though I do remember a time or two or three when something would cause a comment frenzy.

Such as the time sinkholes near Wink, out in West Texas, caused a comment frenzy of dozens, coming in so fast I lost control of it. As soon as I would publish a comment, two more would come in, all arguing about sink holes, if I remember right.

It may have been more complicated than simply being about sinkholes...