How comboxes work

Just so you know, the way *you* experience comboxes and the way I experience them is totally different. I see a feed of all traffic from all boxes in chronological order, all jumbled together. You see a particular blog entry and scroll down a bazillion comments in that entry in order to continue your discussion of printer toner or the infield fly rule. If the thread has no particular interest to me, I just buzz past and either look for stuff the interests me, or some people not Playing Well with Others, or somebody saying, “Hey Shea! Attend to me!”

I try to reply to people demanding my attention, even in threads I haven’t been following. If I politely do this, and you declare that my failure to banish Poster Q in a thread that I haven’t been following can only be due to my unmitigated evil, cowardice and lust for blog traffic, mostly what you succeed in doing is flagging your accusation with a big note that says, “Here be Jerks!” If you shrilly persist in that accusation even after it has been explained that I don’t follow all threads and Poster Q is advocating a thesis *contrary* to what I said in my entry–well now you are helping me decide that you are someone I can do without who never will be missed.

Moral: I dislike being screamed at. Don’t do that if you want to post here.