The comments are falling! The comments are falling!

No, it's not another "Comments Slide" (whew!) - been there, done that. It's something completely different. Februs has been kind enough to post a fairly lengthy"Announcement" (in twenty words or less) that explains everything in great detail. For those of you who don't wish to take the time to read it, let, me summarize it for you: We authors are retroactively losing the padding of our comment statistics we managed to accrue by commenting on our own stories. That's right - we'll have to depend on our readers to pad our statistics for us. While few other authors managed to amass the 1,289 self-comments that I did, a few of you will notice appreciable reductions in your totals. With any luck, we will not have to re-celebrate anyone's reaching some major numerical plateau, but you never know. For those of you who can't imagine why, after encouraging the posting of comments, Februs is going through the time and trouble to REDUCE the comment totals here in the Library, I assure you that this is a GOOD thing. Authors who don't waste time commenting on their own stories will have more time to write new ones. Now, if we could only do something about authors who waste time posting on the Forum...

No, no you have it all wrong . . . authors should get credit for a comment every time we post to the forum! Maybe two credits if we start the thread . . . and extra credits if we use a lot of exclamation points!!!

Or, maybe we should have a comment contest, um, I mean a comment challenge! I give myself 10 points for suggesting it.

!!!

I did actually explain it all 2 months ago ... (see post entitled 'Author comments on own submissions' made 12th Feb 2012 on the Noticeboard forum) ... it's taken this long to sort it all out. Anyway, finally it's all done so all the comment totals now represent observations made purely by readers. The plan now is not to make any further enhancements to the site ever, get someone else to pre-format and load all the stories and spend the rest of the year fell walking in the Lake District.

How does an author make a comment on their own story? Was there a backdoor comment portal I missed?

Now that explains why I am down one comment, one I posted when new to the library and was not aware this wasn't kosher.

LOL, I had no idea how many comments I had, so if they have been reduced, I'm not really aware of by how many anyway. Not that it matters, because I don't think I actually commented on my own stories, at least not many.

It used to be possible to comment on one's own stories, but I don't know if it still is.

The 'pop-up' function has pretty much replaced authors responding to story comments with posted comments of their own, but for some writers (myself included) it used to be a fairly common practice in this Library... --C.K.

Authors can still comment in general on their own submissions but the comment now goes into a special "author comment" section at the top of the comments list and is intended for general remarks rather than ongoing dialogue with a commenter. The problem in the past was that authors responded to comments on their submissions by making further comments but the person they were responding to only got to see the remark if they revisited the comments for that particular submission (which they very rarely did). Over time we made it easier to respond to comments via popups which I believe most authors use now.

All one did was to open their own story, go to the comment section and start commenting. Like CK, when I first started instead of replying to comments with pop-ups, I would answer back by adding my own comment. Fortunately for me I did not do this past the first month or so.

Well, good luck with that one ...