I don’t want to share my weblog’s pain

Jim Winstead’s getting tired of flooding his own mailbox with notifications about blocked TrackBack pings. Of course, if I wrote my own that’s just the sort of itch I’d leave unscratched, but I don’t quite see why people who know they are writing for others feel free to share the pain of a flooded weblog by flooding the owner’s email as well.

If my weblog wants to tell me when I’ve got one moderated comment/ping, with a direct link to edit it, that’s great. If it wants to tell me I’ve got two moderated submissions, with a link to a page that lists them both, that’s a good idea: I get distracted by shiny things quite often, and might have forgotten. But if I’ve got three, or five, or ten, or thirty, I don’t want to know about it each and every time. Once you’ve told me there’s more than one, and where to see them all at once, please just shut up about them until I clear them out, or until you’ve got something new to say. If the incoming rate trips a “moderate everything” throttle, or the total number trips a “shut everything off” throttle, tell me, but otherwise, quit badgering me. If I don’t clear out your backlog when you tell me I’ve got 39 moderated comments, it’s because I’m not there, not because I need 40 emails instead of 39 to get me moving.

4 Comments

Comment by Geof F. Morris #
2005-04-11 19:10:33

Phil, I’ve found that it’s far more beneficial to me to not get notified about pending moderations via email, but to just have a large, bolded link when I log in to the control panel to do something. I just make sure that I log in a few times a day to make sure that I get ’em all. Beats death-by-pinging, and hey, while I’m in there, maybe I post something. :)

 
Comment by Richard Evans Lee #
2005-04-12 05:19:15

I have dozen or so weblogs (yeah, I know, insane).

Late last year I was sick for two weeks. Yesterday while looking at inbound links on one domain I discovered that I hadn’t cleaned up all the mess that had accumulated when I was unable to use the PC.

One site had 200 porn trackbacks in Google.

Comment moderation I accept as a necessary evil. But over the years very few of the trackbacks I’ve received did more than quote part of my article. For me they’ve served little purpose other than knowing I’d been mentioned.

Mt-tb.cgi is gone from all of my servers. Now I need to rewrite my templates and take out the trackack URL.

 
Comment by Pete Prodoehl #
2005-04-13 13:47:36

It’s not ”comment notification” it’s ”comment spam attack alarm” – right?

Comment by Phil Ringnalda #
2005-04-13 22:04:57