Pet peeve: blogs without an email address or contact form
I'm trying to nurse a pet peeve about blogs. It probably won't bother me tomorrow, but with regular watering and care this baby pet peeve may just sprout into a full-blown grudge.
It's when the blog author doesn't have any way for a reader to contact them.
In the past month I've needed to contact three different blog owners to let them know I accidentally submitted a comment twice, or that there was some other problem with the comment function, and I haven't been able to because there's no email listed. Ocassionally, I've wanted to ask permission to use a photo.
The absence of an email address or contact form means there's no discrete way for me to "talk" to the author. A last-ditch option is to leave a comment on one of their posts, and I have gotten through to them this way. But I don't usually like to do that, because (1) it's off-topic and (2) it puts them on the spot, publicly.
I understand not every blogger wants conversation to flow both ways. And at worst, there's a duplicate comment left at a blog and it isn't a big deal.
Still, a part of me says: anyone can set up an email account through GMail or Yahoo! nowadays -- it's easy peasey. So why not create an email account solely for your blog to field any queries?
Whew. I feel better now.
6 comments:
I'm one of those without a visible email address. When I first started the blog I had my address up for nearly a year and in that time only ever got 1 comment from a reader. I did, however, get floods of spam. That flood continues, because it got harvested and traded for quite a length of time.
I'll think about putting it back up, but my readership is small enough that I doubt that anyone really wants or needs a way to contact me. And my comment threads are short enough that nothing would get lost there.
I'm blowing off steam with this post more than anything. I realize you, and other bloggers, have valid reasons for not having a contact form or email address.
And really there's no blogging rule that says you *have* to make yourself available to anyone.
It's trivial to put your e-mail address up in a format that is comprehensible to humans but not usable by spambots.
Just post this on the sidebar:
your-email-address (at) email.com
Great tip Fiat Lux.
Gmail catches most of my spam but I may just do that.
I share your irritation. Just this past week there was a blogger I needed to contact about something important she'd linked to from my blog and I'd subsequetly altered. No email and the comment function was turned off. Gah!
:D Yes, I think "Gah!" summarizes my feeling exactly. ;)
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