Comment Awaiting Moderation

So you have a comment awaiting moderation on your blog. Are you a controlling, censoring, narrow-minded pig if you don’t approve it?

This morning I awoke to an email telling me that I had a comment awaiting moderation on my blog about writing. On that blog, I had spent many painstaking hours transferring all 61 days of my Bible devotional (not to mention the painstaking hours to write the book version before that, finding every mention of God’s kingdom in the Bible and spreading them out in digestible-sized daily readings), and now I saw that I had a comment on Day 61. Yippee! Someone had read the whole thing (for free, you’re welcome) and they were commenting to thank me for doing all that work!

Alas, the comment didn’t seem to be thanking me. I’d had a short night of sleep, so as I lay in bed looking groggily at the email on my phone, it took me a while to figure out what I was reading. At first, I thought the comment was telling me that I had it wrong about Jesus’s command to love others. The comment said something about how loving others without worshiping God was wrong, and I scrolled up through my blog post to see if I had said any such thing.

I hadn’t said any such thing, of course. And how easy am I to gaslight if I had to reread my own writing to make sure?

At this point, my thought was to tell this guy where he could put his comment. Don’t be crass. I meant in his own blog.

ANYWAY, then I realized that the whole comment was an unattributed poem. Did the commenter write the poem? I copied and pasted it into a Google search to see what came up. What came up was this same poem in the comments of ANOTHER Christian blog post. “Hey,” I thought. “This guy goes around commenting his poem on everyone’s blogs.”

I considered hitting “approve.” He wasn’t rudely arguing with my writing, after all.

But wait! What if I copied and pasted my work indiscriminately in the comments of someone else’s blog without commenting on their work at all. Would I even think about doing that? Of course not!

So if you are as neurotic as me, I’d like to remind you that there are some kinds of comments you don’t have to approve.

Comments That Are Unrelated to Your Post

Especially if they advertise their own stuff. This is my blog, and I’ll advertise my own stuff and other people’s stuff that I truly admire. For instance, I think you should read my fairy tale comedy Littlefoot Part One. You’re here on a humor blog, so I think you might like it. 99 cents on Kindle. A Kindle app is free, BTW. And if that Bible devotional piqued your interest, it’s over on my blog mlmillard.wordpress.com and it’s called Seeking First His Kingdom (61 days of worry-free devotions).

Rude Comments

Come on, people! It’s YOUR blog. You do not have to put up with that. And don’t be tempted to approve just so you can reply with that amazing comeback you thought of. They’ll reply back, and it will be a whole big mess.

Whatever Comments You Want

It. Is. Your. Blog.

 

M.L. Millard