One of the things that I decided to do with this blog is allowing comments to be posted in an un-molested form, quite unlike a 8 year old boy in Neverland mind. Wait, was that typed outloud? Sorry. Read too many RSS Feeds I guess. Anyway, when someone posts a comment here, I usually leave it alone, even if I don’t agree with them. I’ll remove them if they’re spam or just stupid (the occasional “fuck you” comment doesn’t stick around, unless there’s a reason for it – support your opinions and it will stick around!) or if there were repeats posted. Some of the threads here have over 120 posts to them – the D-Link or iTunes posts even have helpful tips for other users. This is a great, great thing.
So what does it say about a blog that removes your comments just because you don’t agree with the obvious “you should agree with us” opinion? Unless the thing got ate by a blog process (although I do remember seeing it there, after I confirmed) or something, I’d say it’s pretty darned lame.
Hella Lame.
None of us have a habit of removing comments without good reason – if at all. More likely is that you never confirmed your comment so it never appeared. As a matter of fact, I’m certain that’s what happened. Making a public accusation of censorship without any facts to back it up? LAME.
You obviously don’t read many of the comments on our site. if you did, you’d see plenty of disagreement. Hell – it’s encouraged!
Here is the comment you left on the article you reference. There’s nothing objectionable in it that would cause anyone to go out of their way to remove it. The only problem with it is that YOU never confirmed it via email so it will never be seen unless you want to re-post it. If you feel that strongly about it, go ahead… I’m not going to override our validation system for you, however, especially not on a post that wasn’t mine.
Your comment, verbatim, was:
“Both.
It doesn’t have to be one or the other in this case… Sure, Symantec wants to sell more product so it could be a self serving report but that doesn’t make it a less than honest report either. The more popular OSX becomes, the more at risk it will become, because of it’s visibility. Even if it’s 99.9% secure, the amount of people impacted by a security hole will depend on how many people there are running the OS. I’m sure there’s a number of security issues in the Commodore 64 user base: who cares? If a billion people are using OSX and a bug impacts 0.1% users, that’s 10 million people infected and that’s a HUGE news story. It’s the rule of numbers, that.
I still maintain that the only secure system is a disconnect one, but anyway… I say both things are true: a play for sales AND a greater risk as numbers increase.”
Actually, I’ve posted many comments on your site before – and most have even been complimentary – so I’m familiar with the validation process. Which by the way is almost as annoying as having to sign up with an account to leave comments… typically I refuse to leave comments on sites that require an extra step, but since I take the time to leave them on TUAW means it’s not as bad as some, I guess.
And yes, I clicked through the emailed link on this comment. Each and EVERY time I post a comment to TUAW, I have to dig thought my spam filter to find it. I take the time to leave a comment, then to track down the email, because I frequent the site often enough to think that contributions are valued. You can check on your own site: if I’m capable of leaving comments on other posts, this one should have been no different.
Frankly, the fact that you’re finger wagging at me – as well as lecturing me on your validation system when I’ve obviously used it before – is just as “LAME” as trying to accusing me of not researching my facts. Which, by the way, I have.
After digging through my spam box – specifically to find the automated validation email – and after clicking through the link AND refreshing the target page *AND* seeing that my comment showed up, **AND** then, after a couple of days, you go back to the post to see if there’s any follow up ***A*N*D*** the comment is now GONE, what would you think? That someone’s comment validation system sucks or someone pulled the comment? Particularly when there’s been other disagreements with said site, in the past, when the site had first launched, and this post was not rather glowing for Apple’s security methods?
Yeah, right, it’s lame. Lame that I took the time to post all of that, saw it on the post, and then saw it removed a few days later. That’s what generated this post, but thanks for jumping to the conclusion that I can’t read my own email. And for the follow up (no sarcasm on that part of it, actually – it’s good to know that ppl look into stuff like this), but I WOULD do some checking into that comment system of yours… maybe I found a bug, after all.
I think that this is quite a common issue. I’ve spend many an hour typing what I consider to be a useful and well informed perspective on a blog, only to find that it either never gets published or simply gets deleted with all the spam.
At the same time, I concede that it is also very easy to hit ‘delete all’ or ‘mark all as spam’ as quite often, one is absolutely right in doing so.