Well, it’s taken ten years, but as of a few minutes ago, the number of comments on this site passed a million.

I noticed a few days ago that we were close to the Golden Number, and, if I was awake, I wanted to watch as it happened. But the comments accumulated faster than I thought, probably because I don’t notice comments on old posts.

So, when I just looked at the dashboard, I saw this:

I was going to offer a prize for the millionth comment, too, but worried that that would inspire a lot of comments that wouldn’t normally be made. So perhaps the prize is best offered post facto.

When I looked to see what was the penultimate comment, it turned out to be from a “regular” who makes a big contribution to the site (click on screenshot to see this comment in situ):

So Michael Fisher made the millionth comment, and he gets a prize: a book by me of his choice, autographed and with a drawing of his choice (contact me, Michael). I have no hardcovers left of Why Evolution is True, but a couple dozen of Faith versus Fact, so it’s your choice. Or, if you want one sent to someone of your choice as a gift, I’ll be glad to do that.

It’s an appropriate comment for #1,000,000, too.

Note that there are on average a tad more than 50 comments per post. I always told myself that when it dropped below that, I’d think about giving up the website. I don’t think I’ll do that, as I now realize that many people read the site on their phones, which doesn’t register as “hits”, and it’s harder to comment when reading on a phone.

Anyway, it’s been a good run so far, and I’m going to keep going.

Thanks to the many readers who commented over the last decade (we started in January of 2009) and to Michael, who deserves his prize because he’s made not only many comments, but enlightening ones.

Sadly, there are a fair amount of comments that arrive here, and are held in moderation, without either a name or an email address. They are innocuous comments that would be posted if they bore a name and an email address (the latter is never shown on the site). As I said before, I’ve started trashing these comments because we can never identify a specific commenter so long as he/she uses “anonymous”. If this site is to work, we have to have a person associated with each name, real or not, and you must stick with your name unless for some reason that’s impossible.

When you make a comment, PLEASE fill in your name and email address (they don’t have to be the right ones, though I’d appreciate a correct email address since I sometimes contact readers), and make sure it’s in there when you submit the comment. Otherwise your comment won’t show up.

Yes, I know WordPress is being wonky these days and I’m trying to do something about it. But until we can identify the issue and fix it, please fill in your name and email.

As of today, I’m no longer allowing comments to be posted whose authors are “Anonymous”, which is what the website does by default if you don’t fill in your name. As I’ve said before, while I don’t require that people give their real names (or their real email addresses in the submitted comments, addresses that are never shown but which I sometimes use to contact a reader), each commenter should have a unique name so that we can follow a given person over time. You can’t do that with an author called “anonymous.”  In the past several days there have been about ten such comments, and I’ve binned them.

PLEASE make sure your name and an email address are filled in when you make a comment. It may take an extra two seconds, but that’s not much trouble, is it?

Thanks.

I’ve had a number of posts from people who post as “anonymous,” presumably because they haven’t filled in their names (and often not an email address, either, though that never appears to other commenters). This may be a WordPress problem, but I think that it’s simply because people post hastily or expect autofill to fill in their information when it doesn’t.

Sadly, the autofill feature seems to have gone kaput for many people, and I cannot get WordPress to fix it. I think you can fix it by registering for a WordPress account on WordPress.com (you don’t need to have a website to do that), but I’ve heard that some people don’t want to do that.

For the time being, I am going to stop posting comments that are “anonymous”, and ask you to fill in your name or whatever pseudonym you want. The reason, of course, is that an identity, real or not, should be attached to every comment so that readers and I can follow a single person’s comments. If you use “Anonymous” (which automatically appears if you don’t put in a name), readers and I can’t tell one Anonymous from another.

So please, even if it’s a bit onerous, fill in your name and an email address for every comment you make if it’s not autofilled. This really shouldn’t take much time.

If tech-savvy readers want to give hints or the like, be my guest.

I’ve gotten a lot of emails over the last week from readers saying that they are having trouble commenting, with the most common complaint being that the “autofill”—your name and email address being automatically filled in when commenting on this site—no longer works.

I’m working on this issue, but here’s one thing you can try. What you want to do is clear from your browser the “cookies” connected with this site, but only from this site. Reader Michael, who’s helping out here, says this:

WHAT ARE COOKIES?

Browsers store information from websites in the form of cookies and a cache. This stored information helps web pages you’ve already visited load faster and remembers your personalized selections between visits (e.g., search location, page format, themes, language selection etc.). There are also other less ‘friendly’ cookies called 3rd party cookies that store data about your internet habits such as what sites you visit or the searches you’ve made. Sometimes, all this stored information can cause interference because a site may introduce a new updated cookie & the old version is still hanging around,  or a cookie is corrupted. The best move then is to delete all cookies for that site and they will reappear next time you use the site.

AUTOFILL DATA

An advantage of using cookies is that they can keep you logged in a website so that you can skip the login page and quickly get to where you want. Facebook and Twitter’s cookies will let you do this, for instance. But if you delete a sites cookies you might find the login fields no longer autofill next visit for that site [other sites will be OK], just manually enter your details this one time & it will autofill from then on.

Before deleting cookies it is best to make sure you’re running latest version of the browser.

Then, I searched for the name of this website in step 6, and got this.  I didn’t remove the six cookies for my site as I’m not having any problems, but this is what you should try if you’re having problems.

If this doesn’t work, or you have some other problem, please describe it below or email me. I have been talking to WordPress, and while they’re not always that helpful, they may be able to fix some people’s problems.

—The Management

I remind readers of Rule #9, which is sometimes being broken in a big way. If you’re in a one-on-one comment war, do not let it go on too long unless it’s informative. And if you simply want to comment again and again after a given post, think twice:

9.) Try not to dominate threads, particularly in a one-on-one argument. I’ve found that those are rarely informative, and the participants never reach agreement. A good guideline is that if your comments constitute over 10% of the comments on a thread, you’re posting too much.

And if you’re a newbie, please read the posting rules. The one broken most often by new commenters is the requirement for civility.