Thursday, April 23, 2009

ON BLOGGING ~ What We Have Here Is A FAILURE To Communicate...



Well, we are honestly shocked that some of you continue to leave comments for us on our posts. You probably think we are the rudest Bumbles ever. You take the time to leave a nice comment for us and never hear a peep back. Well - we have been trying to reach you. And you have probably been trying to reach us. It's just that none of us realized it.

Every time someone leaves us a comment, we get a nice little e-mail notification, seeing as how we don't like to miss anything. And a lot of the time, we hit reply and send you a personal and detailed response message. But guess what? A lot of you aren't getting them. And we didn't know this because the messages never bounced back to us as undeliverable.

We did notice that some of the e-mail addresses said "noreply-comment @ blogger.com" instead of an actual e-mail address. But we thought that was just to protect your privacy and that the e-mail was still being routed to you. WRONG! Turns out that e-mail address is valid but belongs to a Comment Gobbler that is just gorging themself on all these messages rather than passing them along. Big meanie.

So - to rectify this matter, you need to provide an e-mail address in the Profile of your blog. If you don't, it will remain a big secret, but you will never get any personal e-mail replies from us or anyone else to your comments. Now to be clear, we do also go visit your blog - but sometimes it isn't always the best forum to reply to your comment. Say for example you left this hysterical comment about some stupid rant we had made (like this one) - and we go to your blog and your posts are all about this very serious update on your family member's terminal illness. Not exactly the appropriate place for us to banter back with you. A personal e-mail to you would be the perfect solution.

To make your e-mail address public, follow the instructions here that Suz @ GreenJello very succinctly posted a few months ago. These apply specifically to Blogger. I'm not even sure it is a problem for Wordpress users. If you are hesitant to put your e-mail address out there, set up a separate one on Yahoo or Google exclusively for this purpose and your personal e-mail address can remain private.

We were guilty of this ourselves. But we didn't know!!!! Now we do so we have rectified things on our end. And if you do the same you'll be able to receive e-mails from us as proof that we aren't rude Bumbles after all. We're just a little slow on the technology stuff.

6 comments:

Mia Celeste said...

No worries with me. I've been hearing from you.

Sandy Nawrot said...

Well, I guess I am happy to comment, response or no! I am used to people working full time or more than full time and don't expect them to worry about me! Anyway, my e-mail is on my blog, but will try your suggestion!

Krissy said...

Thank you! You just saved me quite a few emails that people will never get!

Devilish Southern Belle said...

I'm not hesitant to put my email out there or anything, but for a non-blogger user, it doesn't ask for that info. Disqus comments work with blogger, and they do have that field in their comment form. You may want to look into that or something similar at some point if you really enjoy emailing comment responses :)e

An Eerie Tapestry said...

I was guilty as well. I assumed making it public would put it on my profile page so lots of spambots could clog up my Inbox. Anyway, I've followed the instructions now, although I really don't expect a reply everytime I comment on a blog.

storyteller said...

Interesting 'rant' ...
I've finally learned to CHECK before I send an email response, but when I forget Google DOES 'bounce' the email to me as a reminder of my error. As far as responses, my email has always been on my profile ... but what I see from you most often is a LINK to my posts (on those rare occasions I actually click on the post title and links become visible). That said ... I've not spent much time visiting ANYONE for quite a while now because I've not been home enough to spend time at the computer, but once upon a time I visited often and left comments everywhere. Such is life ;--)
Hugs and blessings,