Not approved for comments?

18 Jul, 2008 Hmmmm..., Well Duh?

I have been a lifehacker reader for quite some time, but I never bothered to get involved with the community. That was until a few weeks ago when I tried to get in on a discussion about Dropbox. At this point I didn’t have Dropbox and there where people in the comments offering invites. What better to get involved in the conversation than get an invite and try it out for myself, so I left a comment asking for one. That’s when I found out that the team at lifehacker moderates their comments, big deal right I mod mine to make sure they are real and relavant to the topic. It turns out that at lifehacker you have to be an approved commentor. How you become an approved commentor is a bit of a mystery to me, lifehacker Comments FAQ. Ok so it’s not that much of a mystery but who reads these things through right off the bat anyway. Well I guess I should have paid more attention becasue as a result of my asking for a Dropbox invite I have been banned from commenting, and there is no mechanism in place to change that either, no 2nd chance, no appeal, nothing. You can send an email but you won’t get a response, they make that quite clear with this disclaimer:

Please note that due to the amount of emails we receive, we may not be able to reply to every email.

lifehacker - posting comments denied

I know it says “may not” but it might as well say “don’t bother”. I have sent an email asking that my account be removed because I thought like other blogs they were trying to build a community but it turns out that they are just building a clique and I am not interested in that. So I will save my comments for other blogs that talk about the same things as they do and spend my time on them.

Oh and to make matters worse, they pointed out that I don’t have any friends… nice.