First of all, as always, read the comments policy. In particular, don’t be surprised if your long comment is not read and approved. Second, don’t be surprised if your comment about the comments policy is not approved and commented on.
Now to something not really relevant to the comments policy, but relevant to comments: the other TIE bloggers and I have noticed a fair number of comments lately by folks who strongly suggest, or outright demand, that we should change our posts or charts to reflect their preferred view or analytic plan.
Sorry, we cannot always do that. It should be obvious that we can’t respond to every comment by tweaking posts or else we’d never do anything else. It should also be obvious that just because you think your view of things is right, other people disagree with you, possibly even us. Perhaps less obvious is that sometimes our posts are informed by input from subject-matter experts. For example, I often share posts with the authors whose work I write about. If they’ve confirmed I characterized things properly or if I’ve learned something from them about the true nature and proper interpretation of the work and updated the post accordingly, I won’t later contradict that in a further revision, despite your urging that I do.
Just because we can’t always change things doesn’t mean you don’t have a point. Speaking for myself, I do take opposing points of view into consideration when I post. What I learn today, possibly from the comments, influences what I write later. So, keep commenting, but please recognize we cannot honor demands to codify your points in the post.
UPDATE: Inserted reminder to read the comments policy. It explains why comments are not approved.
