Dear Mr. Cecil,
Your website is such a sh… shhhh.
Sorry,
But I surf a lot on the net and I think I know exactly what kind of a website there should be. So I also must tell what your website lacks.
I must say that it is one of the most user-UNfriendly and the most frustrating one. Nowhere have you written clearly that how you have to actually post a “reply”, or rather “start” a reply, that would be a ‘comment’ to your column. But first, have you anywhere ‘defined’ what you mean by a “column” on your website? All I got was an “answer” to a question asked by someone, which, after an hour or so I come to know was the column itself. Then if I add a comment, it is not going to appear the way the column is, so I keep searching for one hour how my post can become a part of that page.
Then may be someone already replied to that post, so may be I can join that thread, but then you don’t have a search command to search the replies. All these things matter a lot, and perhaps there is much more of such things.
Must say that you have to do a lot of work on your website right now.
Thx.
Reading the OP makes me feel like my head is full of bees. :eek: :dubious: :smack:
He surfs a lot on the net- but not quite enough to have ever before encountered an online edition of a newspaper column, or a message board, or how to look around a site to see how it works.
We should definitely hire this guy as an advisor. When we make the site simple enough for him to use easily, it will be usable by anyone, even small children, housepets, and some more advanced fruits.
May I recommend using a nightstick, officer.
You might find this page of interest, as well as this forum, and this forum on our Message Board. (I’m thinking you got here from thispage?) Welcome, look around, soak in the culture, and see if you might enjoy being here. 
I can kind of see where the OP’s coming from, although he/she phrased it in a rather muddled and hostile way. It’s a valid point of view.
It sounds like this person read the column in the paper and was sent here by a URL expecting a “Cecil online” where you’d see a chronologically ordered, searchable list of Cecil’s columns, each as the beginning of its own thread, where you could then reply to it (and Cecil might respond).
Instead, what we’ve got is a poorly organized “best of” compendium, accompanied by a completely separate message board where you can go copy and paste what you’re talking about in the hopes of attracting large numbers of non-Cecil people, many presuming to speak on his behalf.
Honestly I too would like to see something like this, but unlike the OP I find it “good enough” and I don’t take gross personal offence that this site hasn’t been set up to my liking.
I think some of our current posters may resent this comment. 
I suspect we may have a language issue here. If HDW’s first language is not English, he or she may not know that “column” in this context means a newspaper column. I should hope the membership of this message board will welcome him and not think less of him for the mistake and the resulting frustration.
Since this is a comment about this message board and this website, I’ll move this thread over to the ATMB forum.
bibliophage
moderator CCC
Vice-President, in charge of quotation marks sounds like the right position.
Moderator growls: Hey, personal insults are NOT permitted in this forum. We have here a new poster who has had some problems, and for whom English is possibly not the native language, and any such guest is entitled to good manners and common courtesy.
Thank you, Brain, for trying to interpret. That helps, I think.
Holydoom Witch, welcome, and we’re sorry you’ve had problems. I think you probably came in a side door. If you go to our home page first, at www.straightdope.com and thence click on FAQs etc near the top under the banner, you’ll find some of your difficulties answered, I think.
In terms of the Archives being better organized, we have two practical difficulties. The first is that we don’t have the resources; that is, someone with the time and energy to figure it out. And the second, and more important, is that Cecil’s columns don’t tend to fit common classifications. Traditional academic classifications don’t apply well. Some of them, sure. Did the Pilgrims land on Plymouth Rock because they ran out of beer? would be “History.” But what would you do with Can a live person be packed in a shipping crate and mailed? Economics? Geography? Travel? Or Could a human swing through the jungle on vines?: Botany? Phys Ed? Literature? Travel?
And if the classification system is fuzzy and ambiguous (which is would almost have to be) or the largest category is “Miscellaneous”, what’s the use of spending all that time and effort?
Besides, Cecil thinks it’s fun to come across random bits of wonderful knowledge.
However, thanks for your thoughts. We hope you’ll explore around a bit more and find yourself more comfortable with us. We understand that the introduction can be a bit rocky. And please, pay not attention to the boors who were unwelcoming.
I should hope that a person would let people know if that’s the case. If I visited a predominately French message board, I’d let people know up front that it isn’t my first language. Otherwise, my gaffes might reasonably be construed as those of an illiterate Frenchman. I think it’s up to me to provide the context for people who don’t know me.
That said, the OP does not have the earmarks of foreign language mistakes, but of ordinary English mistakes. It is filled with colloquialisms and rather complex tense structures that are not typical of someone just learning English. It isn’t that the individual sentences are incomprehensible, but that they comprise a list of non sequiturs. And there is certainly no indication that the OP thought that a column was a cylindrical structure or something else other than an article — the word he used as a synonym. Finally, there is “Thx” at the end, a word that evokes, to me, an adolescent American who is into text messaging.
So is the paying membership, but oh well. While you’re growling at us for personal insults that you’ve imagined, I’d recommend that if you really believe that English is someone’s second language, use fewer metaphors about things like side doors, and avoid sentences with semi-colons and fifteen-letter words.
It occurs to me that my posts might have come across as contentious sidetracks. My apologies to Bibliophage and Dex and others who might be interested in the topic of the OP.
HDW, you seem to have mistaken this site for a blog, by what I read in your post.
This is a message board meant to accompany a long-standing (30 years) newspaper column.
The column is not an editorial, but a Q&A column, of which there are many dozens (ever hear of Dear Abby or Marilyn Vos Savant?)
A blog is often written with the fact that response will likely be seen in conjunction with it. A newspaper column obviously ought not to be. Thus your comments will not appear on the same page as the column.
There is indeed a search command, but it is admittedly not without its glaring flaws.
As the site is maintained by a small alternative Chicago-area newspaper, there is a paid subscription after thirty days access for free.
Lovely imagery. Thanks. Now I know what to call it: I feel like that everytime I have to teach kindergarteners.
FWIW, Miss Manners’ columns on the Washington Post archive all have links to blogs (about the column) directly from the column’s front page. That probably doesn’t help the cause, though.
And BTW, I wholeheartedly agree with Liberal. I spend a lot of time with people who are non-native English speakers–my girlfriend and most of her generation and older in her family were born in Mexico–and this guy doesn’t sound like that.
I know I did, and I was disappointed. I don’t regret it now, though.
FWIW, this website hasn’t really changed in a decade.
I don’t know enought to guess at what brought the vast majority to these boards, but this wasn;t the case for me. I had been reading Cecil’s columns for years in the Reader and stumbled across the web site one day. It was the link to Threadspotting that made me keep coming to the boards here, not any desire to send a question. I had sent Cecil a question some time back, but my connection to the boards wasn’t related to that question.
This place is a big, sprawling, free flowing community. Some members know each other, their quirks, interests and tendencies. If the members within a community like that occasionally address things to each other, I don’t think that qualifies as being clique-ish. Hell, most everyone here at some time was new and felt a bit like they moved into a new neighborhood. But it’s a pretty welcoming neighborhood, albeint one with rules and expectations of behavior. Certainly a regular reader of the columns with an understanding of nuance would expect a certain level of snarkiness and cracking wise. I’d almost be disappointed if it weren’t the case. The last thing I think I’d do is label a group as not adult enough for it.
Ah, no. I started out (under another name) criticising Cecil, in the wrong Forum…my post wasn’t too well…hmmm. I’ll be dammed. :o