A Few Questions About Comments, Answered

We’re about a week into Idolator’s WordPress-Powered Era, which is more than enough time for me to have crafted a new edition of our Comment FAQ, updated with questions that have come into the tip line over the last few weeks. (Is your question not answered here? E-mail me and I’ll fix the problem and add it to this roster.)

I’m new here. How should I get into the whole commenting thing? Be witty; be informative; but most of all, be relevant to the topic at hand. Spamming a post about, say, DMX with a link to your Web site that also has information on a drug-plagued famous person is not welcome; nor are comments with lots of misspelled words or ad hominem attacks. (And yes, I do remove users who start off strong, but veer into the latter sort of behavior.) You can be as anonymous or forthrightly yourself as you like; we do require that you associate your name with an e-mail address, although there are throwaway-address servers you can use if you don’t want to be traced. I had a comment account in the Gawker days, but now the system isn’t recognizing my username and password. What steps should I take? Did you have a different display name than a login name? The system wants you to register with your display name. Did your commenter name on the old system used mixed case? The login system is case-sensitive, so “nedraggett” won’t work, but “NedRaggett” will. Was your commenter name on the old system long, or did it contain punctuation or spaces? E-mail me with your particulars, and I’ll try to figure out where you’re located in the system. Did you associate an e-mail address with your account? If you didn’t, you won’t be able to reset your password. Worried about the anonymity of the old system going away? Try the completely anonymous e-mail server Mailinator for a dummy address. I’m getting errors about my browser not accepting cookies, but my browser accepts them. What’s going on? Log out, clear any cookies your browser might have from Idolator.com, quit your browser, and log in again. I’m in the database, but my comments aren’t showing up. Wait a few minutes; if your comment included a URL or hyperlink, it has to be manually approved (so as to protect us from spammers).

More to come–send in any questions you might have!