Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Comments on my blog and bug reports

I sometimes get comments on articles of my blog. I can classify them in 3 different categories:
  • spam
  • comments about the article
  • comments about something else

Spam

Spams are (manually) rejected.
I do not get many spams.

Comments about the article

I like comments about the article. I accept questions about the article or about a specific point. In general I add an answer immediately (if I know the answer).

Comments about something else

Sometimes I have to moderate comments about something not related to the article.
The blogger.com application do not allow me to reject the comment and explain why I rejected the comment to the comment author. So I reject the comment and the comment author has no idea of what happened.

Example

For example I got, for the second time, a comment on the Mac OS X Mountain Lion and smart card status article. The comment is:
" Anyone having issues with reading encrypted messages via a CAC within Mountain Lion and Outlook?

I can sign and encrypt, and people can read them, but I cannot decrypt. It is not the card or reader, it works fine on the PC.

It is very strange because if an encrypted email comes in, I briefly can read it in the window pane, but if I revisit the message or double click to open, I get an error and the message is lost forever. Everything worked fine under Lion, only appeared after ML upgrade. "
This comment is not about the article itself and is not a spam.

Problems with Mountain Lion or any other Apple components shall be reported to Apple using https://bugreport.apple.com/, or maybe the Apple CDSA mailing list in this case.

Since I cannot contact the comment author (Mike) and explain why his comment is misplaced I wrote this blog entry.

Documentation

Just above the comments text array I added a documentation:
Please, do only post comments related to the article above.

For general questions, subscribe to and use the muscle mailing list.

Your comment may be moderated and will not appear until then. No need to repost the same comment.

Maybe the documentation is not visible enough, or not clear enough. Please add your comments :-)

Conclusion

My blog is not a forum.

I do not work at Apple and do not plan to provide Apple support for free.