I have a website that has a low-tech guestbook. (I get the submissions and have to manually edit them into the interface, which means it is a moderated guestbook whether I like it or not). People reading another person’s posting can respond to it; and people can also, of course, submit a guestbook entry responding to the web site but not to anyone else’s existing posting.
The primitive mechanism I use sends me an email whenever someone elects to reply to an existing posting; this email contains nothing more than sufficient information to tell me what posting they will be responding to when I receive their response.
Here’s the problem: I get a very large surplus of signs that someone has elected to reply to an existing posting but then no actual response is forthcoming. Perhaps 1 in 8 is followed by the actual reply posting.
I don’t know how many people start off to send me an independent (new thread) posting and change their minds, but 1 in 8 seems like an awfully low follow-through statistic, so I’m seeking volunteers to click around in my guestbook and let me know if there are inconsistencies or inconveniences or plain old BUGS that might explain this phenomenon. Things have been quiet lately so I thought this would be a good time to try to track the problem down.
Guestbook is here.
If you suspect that I might just want to you check out my webby site, well, that simply isn’t true and you should be ashamed for harboring such suspicions, but you are of course welcome to do so 