I am still not feeling well enough to comment on posts and reply to comments on mine. I will have to start from scratch once I feel able to sit at the PC and write something coherent.
Meanwhile, I would like to thank everyone who commented on my recent posts, and apologise for not taking time to reply to you all individually.
If you are still celebrating the season, I hope you have a wonderful time.
I have done my best to reply to comments and comment on other blogs today, but now I am overwhelmed by coughing and other symptoms. I have tested negative for Covid once again this morning, so feel it must be Flu or Bronchitis.
Whatever it is, I don’t feel up to writing anything else today, so there will be no serial episode, (sorry about that) and no other posts from me.
See you all soon.
This is the first time I have logged on to WP since Thursday, and I am just back online after a busy weekend away.
I will be starting from scratch, as I cannot hope to catch up with all of your posts. The next episode of the serial will appear at some stage later today, and meanwhile I will try to reply to all of your comments on my posts.
Best wishes to everyone, Pete.
With new followers as rare as hen’s teeth, and many of the ‘Lockdown Bloggers’ disappearing as quickly as they arrived in 2020, I am left wondering whether or not Blogging has had its day.
From limited research, it would seem that Instagram and You Tube have attracted people who might otherwise have been blogging. The instant gratification of a photo or video is a lot less work that an 700-word blog post or a fiction serial, let’s face it.
Over the past few months, I have noticed that comments on my posts are almost always from the same group of people. No complaints about that, as they are my blogging friends, and I value their input and contribution to our community more than I can say.
But casting my eye over other blogs, there is definite evidence of a ‘slowdown’. Many are receiving fewer comments, and no replies to replies. The Reader seems to be being used to just ‘Like’ posts almost immediately, and the amount of comments generated by most posts is falling all over WordPress.
So, does this matter? Personally, I would blog to online tumbleweed, comments or not. But many bloggers are becoming frustrated by the lack of engagement in 2022, and I understand that frustration. I confess that I am lucky. I have amazing followers, regular comments, and daily blog views are usually around 300 since the ‘slowdown’.
Becoming part of such a community takes commitment, and a lot of time at the keyboard. Content is king. So if you do not post regularly, you will get sparse views of your old ones.
Let’s all agree to keep up with the blogs we follow. Show some encouragement, leave comments as well as likes, and keep the circle of blogging alive.
If not, what was it all for?
Since posting recently about not being able to leave comments on blogs I follow, I have managed to cure that problem by using the Reader to comment on posts where that was happening.
However, there seems to be something else happening with WP, double comments.
When someone comments on my blog posts, I get an email notification. That’s as it has always been. But now when they reply to my reply, I get two emails containing that reply. One is notified as a reply to my comment, the second one notified as a ‘new comment’ on my blog post.
To add to that, I am also getting notifications about my own comments, as if it is not my blog. “Beetleypete has left a comment”.
This has trebled the amount of emails I receive in the space of two weeks, as sometimes there will be six email notifications about one comment and a reply.
Has anyone else noticed this development, or is it just affecting me?
It looks as if WordPress has put me on the naughty step again, for reasons best known to them.
On some blogs I follow, my comments are coming up as ‘Anonymous’. On some others, I am being asked to ‘Fill in required fields’. But there are no required fields to fill in, so my comment will not appear. This is happening on a few blogs at the moment, but may well spread. As we all know from experience.
So if you spot one of my ‘Likes’ on your blog post, but no comment, at least you know I tried.
Best wishes, Pete.
Over the past couple of weeks, I have been receiving 7-9 pages of Spam comments daily, and at least 5 pages of Trash, or more. I have done my best to sift through all the nonsense in the hope of finding genuine comments, and managed to retrieve at least 10 this week.
But I no longer have the time or the inclination to do this, so I am apologising in advance for any of your comments that do not appear.
From today, I will be applying ‘Bulk Delete’ on all of it.
Just a quick update.
Ollie managed to finally lie down at 10:30pm last night. He also had a drink of water, his first for over 10 hours. He is not that much better today, and was very stiff-legged on his short walk. But at least he can rest properly now.
I am also unwell, so I will not be posting anything, or reading anyone else’s posts today. Sorry about that.
I hope to be able to get around to replying to all the comments on my posts tomorrow.
Meanwhile, I am going back to bed.
It is only Thursday, and so far this week I have had to recover 17 genuine comments from either the Spam or Trash folders.
None of these comments contained any ‘banned words’, and none had any links, suspicious or otherwise. It appears that WP is dumping some comments randomly again, so you may all want to check these folders before deleting them in bulk.
After all the problems yesterday with genuine comments going into my Trash folder, when I logged on this morning, I found six more.
So I went straight to the Help option (A big ? in a circle) to chat online with a WP technician on Live Chat.
(This option is available to me as I have a paid plan, Premium.)
After some investigation, WP suggested to me that the comments contained some of my banned words, in particular a combination of the letters RV. This means that words such as ‘Deserved’ and Served’ containing those letters in combination caused the comment to be trashed.
Although this did not seem obvious to me, I have done as they suggested, and removed ‘RV’ from my banned list.
I originally put that on the list as I was being plagued with Spam from an American motorhome company using ‘RV’ (recreational vehicle) in their messages.
If the suggestion from WP does not improve things today, I will be straight back onto them and contacting the Live Chat again.
beetleypete 