I try to reply to each and every comment on my blog.
It’s just common courtesy to my readers and I love to extend the dialog beyond
the content of the post itself.
Sadly though, I tend to only be diligent about replying for a week or so before
starting to slack.
After a month or so of slacking, I’ll hop in and binge reply to all of the
pending comments that I have.
At least, I thought I was replying to all of them.
A bit of comment context, I use Disqus mainly because my blog is hosted on
GitHub Pages. GitHub Pages is a free hosting solution for static websites. Since
the sites are static, you need Disqus or something equivalent to host comments.
No big deal, I actually like Disqus. They keep spam to a minimum, have a decent
interface for approving / replying to comments.
So all of the comments I have not replied to or manually approved sit in the
pending queue awaiting my return.
Today was one of those catch up days.
What’s interesting, is that for a while now, it’s always seemed like I was
missing out on replying to some comments. I’d vaguely remember an email about a
new comment then never saw said comment in the pending queue.
With that, I decided to mess around with the filters to make sure I was all
caught up.
The default is to show the comments from the last month. I filtered by the past
year and then all time and didn’t see anything.
Not sure why I did it, but from empty all time list, I decided to switch the
sorting from newest to oldest.
HOLY SHIT!!~!
Much to my surprise, over 100 pending comments showed up!
Stuff from well over a year ago, just hanging out in the purgatory that is the
Disqus pending queue.
Egg on my face. I suck at responding to comments more than I realized.
If you use Disqus and aren’t always as on top of your comments as you should be,
I’d highly recommend tweaking the filters. What you find may surprise you!
Many apologies to the folks that I never responded to. I’m in the process of
catching things up and plan to make responding to comments part of my weekly
blogging ritual moving forward.
Did this post help you uncover some comments in your Disqus? If so, comment
below, I’d love to hear about it!
Pinky swear that I’ll respond 😉
