Recently, Steven pointed everyone over here to a discussion he and I were having. I didn’t expect an Instalanche or anything, but since he has about a bazillion more readers than I do, I figured a freewheeling debate might break out.
Imagine my surprise, when not one person had anything to say. “WTF?” I thought. “Not even the semi-regulars?”
Well, I was reminded today that people who want to comment here are often off-put by the registration. Sigh. I’m sorry about that, but it’s necessary to stop the spambots. You don’t need a “WordPress Login,” just one special to this site. Needless to say, I don’t do anything with the e-mail addresses of my registered users — although for full disclosure, there’s a never-yet-activated “send email to all registrants” feature I could use, were I inclined to do so.
Your first comment will be held for moderation, just so I can be sure you’re not a particularly clever bot. Because of work, it may be several hours before I release it (although I confess to having accidentally let a couple go for a day or two when I’m super-busy and too frazzled to think.) After that, you’re good to go. If I were to open comments again (as Houblog’s used to be) I’d be fighting off the usual culprits; Akismet has captured 4,000 spam in a year for Mahou Meganekko, but over 22,000 in slightly less than two years for Houblog. For simplicity’s sake, I’d like to leave the comment policy the same on both sites, so this is actually a case where Houblog is driving Mahou Meganekko’s policies. Back when I maintained both regularly, Houblog had about five times the readership and higher rank on Technorati. So it gets about five times the spamination.
Anyway, I finally hacked the template files for the footer and registration screen to explain the registration to readers. WP seems to love convoluted template files that call each other into recursive oblivion, which makes me both leery and frustrated when it comes to meddling with them. I do hope more of you will be inclined to register and comment in the future; I enjoy discussing animé, and sometimes it seems like it’s just me and Steven talking. Out of the last 20 comments, exactly two aren’t from one of us.
Random speculation: I noticed a drop in the number of comments right after Steven moved to Pixy’s hosting in May, and opened up comments on his own blog. I’m wondering if some of the comments here were essentially “displaced commentary” from mutual readers who couldn’t comment on his site until he opened the new one? I can’t link the two events for certain, because that’s also when Mother’s hospital stay forced a hiatus for about three weeks.
Hi! I’m a particularly clever bot!
Curses, foiled again!
It may also be that Steven talked Shingu to death with more posts in a week ON THAT ONE ANIME than I post in a month…
I get carried away sometimes. Especially when something is that good.
Heh. It was like watching an episodic set of reviews like some bloggers do for fansubs… only all at once, instead of once-a-week. 🙂 Not to start that argument again, but I still favor Misaki Chronicles over Shingu. But when animé is as good as either one, I have a hard time writing what I feel because it’s difficult to balance out the emotional side with the rational long enough to explain it. In the venue of a blog, I need the rational side in order to express the emotional part in words. The difficulty is that they pull in different directions, making my first drafts bounce around randomly and just not flow well–the emotional is more prone to random jumps and disjointed subject matter. Like this comment. So I have to spend a lot of time working on them, and that’s one reason you haven’t seen “formal reviews” on either. Especially Misaki Chronicles.
I just don’t have the time to do that much posting, plus I’m more likely to get started on a brief note and end up with something a mile long. In part, that’s because of the need to balance the two sides above, and I think that’s partly because the default theme I adapted for here has “large headlines” for the articles, so I think in “large article” format rather than short notes dashed off stream-of-conciousness-style. If I shrunk the post titles to be as small as the comment titles, I might not feel the need for big posts.
Not sure of that; the old Houblog (Post Nuke version) had small titles and I wrote big articles there too.
OTOH, one of the minor things I don’t like about Chizumatic’s comment display format is that I often think “huh? I clicked to read the comments but nothing changed?” because the title on the first comment doesn’t look much different from the title on the previous article that used to occupy that space, and is the same amount of space down the page. I usually realize that about the third time I pound the “add” or “read comments” button. But that’s more likely to be a matter of my browser’s display defaults.
I’ve been out of the loop, besides I haven’t seen Shingu (though I bought it) and I didn’t want to read spoilers.