So no one is visiting you....
January 20th, 2009 in Uncategorized by Westy
The following was written by our dear Samantha Baker. Since it’s good information for everyone, I asked her if I could repost it here:
I’ve sent a note like this to a few of my friends who needed it, and thought I’d put it on here too. This entry is not password-protected.
Wanna know one reason why you haven’t gotten any comments?
If you’ve chosen the second option in the privacy settings area (block the bots but allow regular visitors), then when other people click your profile, it says that you haven’t created a public blog yet. YOU can see your blog listed on your profile page, but WE CAN’T - and you probably don’t even know it!In the privacy settings area, there are two options. The first one says to allow search engines, googlebot, etc. to find you. The other one says to block those things but allow normal visitors. If you think you’re having trouble with your comments, then you’ve probably got the second one chosen. I chose that option at first, because I thought that it would keep the spambots away and protect my privacy a little bit. Well, when you do it that way, it also blocks journalspace from listing your blog in its directory, AND won’t show it on your profile page when people go looking for it. NOT COOL! It says you haven’t published a “public” blog yet - it seems to consider it “not public,” but not quite private either. Readers can only access it by manually typing in balognabutt.journalspace.com (or whatever your address is), and a lot of people don’t know that they can do that! They just see that message and believe it, grumbling about how that lazy (insert cuss word here) hasn’t gotten off of their moldy butt and made a journal yet. I’ve started typing in people’s blog addresses manually (username.journalspace.com) if their profile says that they haven’t created a blog, just to see if they have made one or not. Only TWO of those times, the person actually hadn’t created a blog. All of the others (quite a few), they had a blog, but needed to change their privacy settings in order to make it appear. Two of them even had “Testing 123, hello, do my comments work?” entries. Ha, I did that myself, too, before figuring out what the problem was. I’ve sent them messages, they’ve flipped the switch, and presto, their blog shows up and they get comments! Woohooo!!
SO, if you aren’t getting comments, and you want people to see that yes you have TOO created a journal, check your privacy setting! If it’s set to block the bots/search engines, change it! You’ll most likely start seeing comments soon afterward. You’re perfectly welcome to keep it at the second option if you want to “hide” a little bit (a lot of us do), but then just keep in mind that people may not always remember to check it very often since it’s not showing up on the other pages, and some people may never check it out because they don’t know that you can type your address in manually. Hope that helps!Where to find it? here:
http://putyourjournalhere.journalspace.com/wp-admin/options-privacy.php (of course replacing your journal name where it says “putyourjournalhere” lol)
I hope it helps, too! I know I’ll try to remember it. Thanks Sammy! 
