Comment on Comments

I just wanted to take a minute to address a couple of issues regarding comments, both on articles on GovernmentExecutive.com and items here on Fedblog.

First, we're getting lots of comments in the new boxes that we've included on all of our stories, but several readers have inquired about the status of our old Mailbag section. That's the part of the pre-redesigned version of our site that aggregated comments from readers on all of our stories. We initially thought we'd do away with that section as a destination, because comments on our stories are now integrated directly on the story pages. But since many people seemed to find the Mailbag page itself useful, we've restored it. You can find it here: http://www.govexec.com/mailbag.cfm.

Second, you may have noticed that there haven't been a lot of comments here on Fedblog over the past week or so. That's because it finally dawned on me today that the spam filter settings on the blog were set way too high, filtering out the good comments as well as the junk. So I'm working my way through the process of approving the hundreds of comments that have been posted recently. You'll be seeing all of them soon. And keep 'em coming!

Update, 5/21, 12:46 p.m.: After promising the Mailbag would be available, I went and published a link that wasn't accessible to outside our offices. It is now. Sorry for the confusion.