Add a comment! Here's how

  • Article

One of the goals of TipTalk is to have readers join in the conversation and share their thoughts about the tips and ideas we discuss. Our hope is to encourage a free exchange of ideas among our readers. You can join the conversation by posting a comment. Anyone is welcome to leave a comment about any article on TipTalk. Since we launched TipTalk in August, we've not received a lot of comments. We figured it was partly because the way you post comments is a little hard to see, and we'd been planning to write an article about this topic.  

Well, it so happens, my mom sent me mail the other day asking me how to post a comment to TipTalk. (I suspect it has to do with having used her grade school photo in one of my tips.[:)]) Her question helped confirm our suspicion that discovering how to leave a comment isn't particularly easy.

What we’ll publish
Before leaving a comment, please note that we may not publish it if:
1) It contains material that Jason or I can’t understand (or that might embarrass one of our moms).
2) It asks for specific support information, which we’re unable to provide. (If you need support, please refer to the support pages on At Home  or At Work  as a jumping-off spot to Microsoft’s support services

How to leave a comment
If you’re on the main page of TipTalk, you’ll see all the articles we’ve posted for the current month. Each article is also posted on a separate page within the TipTalk blog site.

To leave a comment on a particular item, click the Comments link at the bottom of the article, as shown in Figure 1. (This image is a snippet of the article I wrote about locking files. At the time I captured this image, no comments had been posted yet.)

Figure 1

When you click the Comments link, you’ll be taken to the page containing the specific article. At the bottom of the item, you’ll see “Post a Comment” as in Figure 2.

Figure 2

Click Post a Comment and you’ll see the input form shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3

Note that you’ll probably have to scroll down to the bottom of your screen to see the input form. Go ahead and enter the name you’d like us to see, and your comment, then click Submit. We’ll check for your comments periodically and post those that we believe will be helpful to other readers.

Thanks for asking, Mom!

---Robbin Young

10/26/05 AM: I just realized that I forgot to tell you how to view the comments that have been added to an article. Look at Figure 1. See how it says "with 0 comments?" Well, if we've posted comments, the "0" will change to however many comments we've added. When you click on the Comments link, you'll see the entire article as well as all the comments that have been added. ---ry