I think I have finally learned my lesson in regards to commenting on Blogger / Blogspot / Google blogs – always, *always* copy the comment I have written before clicking on Publish! That way, if Blogger loses my comment, I can at least paste it back in again.
In the course of learning this lesson, I think I have unearthed a couple of clues that might tell you when you will lose your comment for certain. And here they are.
1. Missing Notify Me Box
If you are leaving a comment on a blog you are familiar with and you have used the notify me tickbox before.. when you find the notify me box is missing, that is a sign that Blogger does not know who you are, and therefore does not know where it should email any future comments.
If the notify me box is missing, this is a sign that when you hit publish, your comment will disappear into the ether never to be seen again.
Another way to double check if the notify me box is present is to make sure when you tick the box, the correct email address appears, as you see above.
2. Missing Account Name
If your Google account name is missing from the Comment as: area, this is another sign that blogger does not know who you are, and therefore cannot leave a comment for you, unless you pick one of the other options. It should look like this –
If it doesn’t look like this, you may not be signed in properly. If you hit publish, your comment will probably disappear into the ether never to be seen again.
However, it is important to note, you can be signed in properly but Blogger can still not know who you and lose your comment. Which leads me back to my number one tip –
3. Regardless, COPY!
Google/Blogger/Blogspot can lose your comment but if you have copied it, you can paste it back in! Always do this, but especially if you have spent significant time writing your comment. This is your number one way of giving a huge middle finger to Google! You can lose my comments Google, but you cannot take my SANITY! :) or, my ability to hit right click, copy.
This is a good habit to get into wherever you are commenting, because sometimes things go wrong and your comment may vanish. With that said, Blogger loses my comments way more often than any other blogging platform.
Do you have a blogger blog, but you do not have a notify me box? Check out this post – How To – Add Tickbox For Blogger Comment Emails.
Over to you –
Do your comments get lost very often? What steps do you take to prevent this? :) Do you have any hints or tips for fellow blog commentators? Leave them in the comments! ;)
My comments don’t disappear very often and I am inconsistent about copying them before hitting post. Still, most of the time it’s no great loss.
The only time I’ll forget to copy my comment, I have learned, is when I have written a long thing and spent a lot of time on it, and hit the button and bang, it is all gone. :( I am making myself copy it before hitting any buttons now, even if it is just one line.. :)
I use disqus to try to circumnavigate this issue. Also using disqus I get nested comments which is a win!!
Disqus has its own issues, in particular their plan to serve ads on peoples blogs without their permission and as a surprise to them.. :(
Ads Are Coming to the Comments Section of Publisher Sites – Plus, there are sometimes issues with if you want to switch back to not having disqus, some blogging platforms will just lose all the comments people left you. :/
Yeah damn it. but its the one I can handle atm. Least them email me that I have a reply, the blogger format had me accidentally ignoring people
I do like their subscribe to comments option. :) I also like you can turn it on and off with one click. :)
I am not sure I fully understand. Isn’t the notify me box to notify you, the commenter, when other people comment on the same blog post? Like on your blog where there is ‘notify me of new comments via email’. I never check the box as I would spend the whole day reading other peoples comments on other peoples blogs. I usually skim through other comments.
Yes, copy, especially if it is a long comment, but I don’t lose a comment too often now. It is certainly annoying and if rewrite the comment, it is never as good.
That is what the notify me box is for – if Blogger does not know who you are, it won’t be able to notify you of further comments – that is why I am suggesting to use it as a confirmation that blogger knows who you are and is not going to eat your comment. :) You can tick the box to make sure it knows who you are, and then untick it.
I always follow the comments when I leave one, because I am often hopeful that leaving comments is not just about me having my say but is something that will turn into a conversation. Rather than my comment being virtual graffiti, I hope it might turn into something more. Sometimes it does, not as often as I would wish though. I have a specific email account set up for leaving and receiving future comments. There are a couple of blogs now where I do not tick follow because they have too many comments on a post but mostly it is between 5-10 future comments that arrive and sometimes those are from the blog owner replying to comments, which sometimes inspires me to go back and comment again. ;)
Everyone gets to do things their own way, of course. If followup comments were mixed in with other emails I would probably find that a little annoying, but because I have the one account for it I can check that once a day and read through the other comments without having to revisit the blogs. :)
Clear now. Yes, it would be a good idea to have an eddress just for follow up comments.
I must be lucky, because I rarely lose comments when I’m using my desktop or laptop. It’s a little more problematic with my phone, but because my fat fingers make too many mistakes on the tiny keyboard I tend not to use it often.
You must be lucky – I was losing 10+ comments a week at one point. It drove me a little cuckoo. :)
Great tip, and a reminder. There’s nothing more annoying that typing out a War and Peace length comment and losing it. NoOoOoOoOoooooooo.
Absolutely – it would always be those long comments I would tend to lose. The ones where I would just type one line never went missing! :)
I have this happen frequently. It has never let me sign in with typepad(error!) so I have to use my google sign in, which doesn’t lead back to my blog. In some ways, that’s OK.
You can update your google profile to point to your blog. I forget how I did that, maybe I will make a how to for that. ;)
I lose them A LOT! And I’m still awful and remembering to copy them,
I’ve only lost a few when I’ve forgotten to sign in. I used to stay signed in and things were okay, then my computer did a few updates on itself, and I didn’t notice that I had to sign in again, so lost a really long comment to several people. For a few days I did the copy thing in case I’d forgotten to sign in, now I sign in before I even start reading.
Yeah, I’ve gotten used to copying comments prior to submitting them because I too have experienced several whoopsies.
Hey Rach, thanks for dropping by my place! :)
I’m not sure why Google is incapable of keeping our comments even if they have to reload the page, but I guess this fits in with their general lack of care about pretty much everything. It is impossible to contact anyone there to solve a problem.. I’ve been waiting over 6 months for someone to get back to me about an email account problem I’ve had.. :(
Hi, thanks for the post. I always copy the comment now because I lose them all the time now. But I have an issue for which I cannot seem to find the answer anywhere: I want to use my wordpress account to comment on Blogger (as it is linked to my website, I cannot do that with my Google account), but that seems to be impossible, as when I select wordpress and type in my account name, it then takes me away from the blog to WordPress to log in, and that’s it! No way of going back. Just wondering if you know what I am doing wrong? Thank you!
As far as I know, you have to use your google account to comment on Blogger. You can link to your website on your profile page, and a lot of people commenting on blogger leave their URL under their comment, eg like this –
Snoskred
http://www.snoskred.org
Sometimes there is an option to use your name and a URL, on blogger. :) I hope that helps!
Thanks for answering, I appreciate that! I’ll use my Google account from now on.