Opinion: Where is my comment?!?

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In case you’re wondering why you haven’t seen your comment on this piece yet, it’s not because we’re censoring them. We typically approve 98% of the stuff that comes in, rejecting only things that are profane, threatening or hate speech. We get a fair amount of comments that include words not publishable in a newspaper, and we reject those out of hand. The other two categories, not so much. We also look askance at comments that insult other commenters without adding any substance to the conversation. Go ahead and insult the writer of the piece, that’s fair game.

So what’s the hold-up? There are two (robotically evil or simply human) forces at work:

1) Our publishing platform online is hideously slow and finicky. We’ll approve comments, then they’ll wait sometimes for hours -- literally -- to make it onto the page. I’d love to work with a better platform, but we don’t have a lot of spare cash these days.

2) We don’t monitor the comment boards around the clock. Sorry, but we just don’t have the staff for that. I wish it could be otherwise, ‘cause lots of people read and comment early in the morning or late at night, and we don’t want to cut them out of the discussion. But for now, it least, it doesn’t work that way.

UPDATED, 2:13 p.m. The cookies used by our site seem to freeze the comments counter at whatever level it was when you first hit the page. To see the latest comments, click on the link at the top labeled Discuss Article. There’s still a time lag between when comments are approved and when they post, alas.

UPDATED, 5:03 p.m. Actually, to see the latest comments, you may have to clear your browsing history -- the temporary copies of the web pages you visit that your browser automatically saves. Go to the Tools menu in IE or Firefox and work from there. (You have to go the Options/Privacy submenu in Firefox to get to the right place.) Yes, that’s a pain in the neck, and no, we’re not trying to make it that way.