Updates on Previously Mentioned Issues

Hi folks -- here are a updates on items that I'd mentioned earlier:

* Hit Counters: Last week, I started getting mail from some of you who'd written in to say that your hit counters had reset. I still don't have any definitive answers as to why this happened -- as you recall, counter resets used to be a much more common occurance, until the Hometown folks took some steps to reduce the "write-lock" problem that caused the problem.

I haven't heard widespread reports of counter problems for some time, so those steps seems to have worked up until recently.

In the meantime, if your counter has reset (or you just generally want to mess about with the numbers on your hit counter), you can use the Web-based File Manager to manually change the number of your counter. Admittedly, it's a slightly involved process, but it's not terribly difficult.

* Blogger.com Comment Notification E-Mails: I don't have an official update from the Mail Ops team yet, so I wouldn't quite count this as closed, but in my own testing, and as some of you have noted in a group blog, the problem I blogged about last Friday regarding blogger.com comment notification e-mails not making it to AOL.com users appears to be better.

I will post any official word when I get it.

* The Star Jones Reynolds Blog: Sorry, this item has been in my "pending" hopper for a while. The Star Jones Reynolds blog, which I originally blogged about when it launched on January 6, pretty much lasted a day and a half -- by Sunday, January 8, it had been made private. The following Monday, it was back up with comments off, but then it was taken down completely Monday or Tuesday.

That's the basic timeline; as to the reason why it was taken down, well, there's not that much to tell: Her first entry with her rules of blog behavior kind of rubbed people the wrong way, but things didn't really get rolling until the hardcore Star Jones haters got into the act.

Here's an independent account by one gossip blogger.

Anyway, there are apparently a lot of folks who purport to hate Star Jones for whatever reason, and a bunch of them got together to raid the comments and try to overrun them with a couple hundred vile, homophobic and generally obscene comments.

As I blogged earlier, celebs are different from us, in that people react to them in a way that's different from regular folks, so in that sense they are exceptional.

The advice that I would normally give to a blogger regarding managing comments doesn't necessarily work when you've got a few dozen or hundred people intent on driving you offline.

Different people handle comment moderation in different ways. I just looked over at the Rosie O'Donnell blog, just to see what she's doing (since she's another high-profile celeb whose blog attracted a lot of attention)  -- some of her entries allow comments, others don't.

Naturally, as a blogger, I would have preferred it if Star Jones had continued her blog (even if she had to turn comments off), though I can understand it if she didn't want to put up with it right now.

Just my opinion. Thanks -- Joe