Carolina Arts Unleashed

I’m pulling the plug on my little experiment of keeping the Comments option “on” at Carolina Arts Unleashed – for the reason I never had it turned on – I don’t want to be a blog site administrator.

I don’t know if this happens with most people’s blogs, but from the start we got a boatload of comments – comments designed to make it look like they were comments about what I had written, but were nothing more than a promo for just about anything you can think of. (Is this a real job?) Some were pretty clever in going the extra mile to make you think they read the entry and some were so lame that the exact same wording was used by several people. And, all were very flattering to me and my “wisdom” or the layout of our page – hoping I would leave them up. I left some up for a week to show people what we were getting, but in the end only five people made actual comments and I knew four of those people.

I thank those folks for those comments and I hope they’ll understand why I don’t have time to deal with all the others. It’s a shame that some always want to take advantage of a situation.

Every time I pulled in e-mail I would have several comments that WordPress wouldn’t automatically post – waiting on approval from me to post them – all of them got deleted – you don’t want to know why. Another group would get posted and WordPress was just sending me an e-mail to let me know it had added it to the comments and what was said – most of these got deleted too.

If I left all the comments that WordPress accepted on there it would just look like a lovefest towards me and the layout of the page. No one’s going to believe that. I know I didn’t – our page layout is as plain as can be.

Why only five real comments? I’m not sure.

Was it a touchy subject which people didn’t want to go public on – maybe, but in some cases you wouldn’t know who the person is unless you knew their user name or real name – if it was given. Lots of people looked at the posting – we’ve got a system that can tell us how many people pull up a given entry – by day or for any given amount of time. That wasn’t a problem.

Someone told me I should have stopped posting and left that post up on top for a period of time, but I can’t do that – the blog is now part of the Carolina Arts communication system. There is too much going on to leave one post up for a long period of time. That person also suggested creating another blog for open comments or as a discussion outlet, but again – I don’t have time to manage that. My plate is pretty full now.

So here’s my solution. If you want to comment about anything I say – write it down and send it in an e-mail – like I suggested when I first started this blog. I can post it later. If that gets to be too much of a hassle – I don’t know what the next step will be, but the bottom line is – the printed paper comes first. That’s my job.

Basically, I don’t think a lot of folks want to make comments – real comments – comments that go beyond “I agree with what you said” or “You hit the nail on the head again”. Those kinds of statements don’t really mean much. I know some people don’t want to stand too close to me in a lightening storm – whether they agree with me or don’t. I don’t blame them. At this point I don’t have much to lose, but others do. And, there are some who just like to make their comments behind the scenes – never in public.

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