Tips for Commenting Here

January 1, 2012
last update October 17, 2015

Comment Policy (subject to change)
I invite comments here, and get plenty. I cannot personally respond to all of them anymore, but there are other commentators now to keep each other company. Please remain on or close to topic, and be civil (don't be fake, just don't be mean either), or I'll figure out how to block people and do it with anger.

I'd like to see more debate on here, if the world full of rebel supporters weren't so weak they can only address this information with silence and willful ignorance.

Spam Filter:
2015 late addition: I've found some comments, especially with links included, don't appear right away. Usually these wind up in my spam comments folder. As long as I'm actively watching (I'm trying to) I'll catch that, say it's not spam, and it'll appear. If it seems slow, try an alert comment, here or at the post. And if I'm watching close enough to see it ... if not, and if it's important enough, drop me an e-mail. caustic_logic at yahoo dot com.

"Comment As"
Some readers ready to contribute thoughts or questions will have a hard time navigating the comment functions. Nothing personal, but that's silly. Or easily-remedied anyway.

I discourage anonymous comments, but won't block anyone for that alone. Here's how you get your posting options:

Click "comment as" until you see the pop-out menu shown above. If you have a google/blogger account you want to use, sign in. Same for the next five options; if you don't know what they are, you probably don't have them. The rest of us can use the last two, preferably the one highlighted here. As soon as you click on it, you'll see this:

 You can type in any name you like. It can even change from one comment to the next, but I don't encourage that kind of confusing trickiness.  Using the URL window instead lets you have your ... hold on, let me do a test comment here and report back.

Back: You need to type a name, and it will be plain text if you leave the url window blank. If you put your website (no spam!) in that box, your screen name will be a link to that. See first two comments for an example of each.

HTML Tags for Links and Emphasis 
Providing links to great information is one of the most useful thing anyone here can do.Full URLs (web addresses) can be simply pasted into a comment, and people can re-copy it into a new window fine. However, HTML links make the it much easier and more useful, and I encourage it.

Making a URL link is a little tricky until you get it. In the following example, everything inside <angle brackets>is magic: "a" says it's a link, href= says "to this", the stuff inside the quotes is the link, copied right from the browser window in full, and "/a" says "end link." Betwen the bracket sets to open and close the link is the text (usually blue) that people will click on for the link. Try it, it's awesome.

Using text emphasis - bold and italics - in your comments is easy as heck. Again, magic <brackets> are used, opening and closing, with a simple letter, "b" or "i", effecting the words between. Here, it'll be extra clear you find that subject very important, but not quite very important.