Dear Friends,

Several World-Outlook readers have posted comments on recent articles. These include What Do U.S. Midterm Elections Reveal? and two columns replying to letters in response to that article:  Why Bonapartist, not Neo-Fascist  and Working-Class Political Consciousness Today. Other readers interested in those comments can find them by going to the original article and scrolling down to the “Comments” section below each one.

Our policy has been to welcome questions, criticism, and other comments on the articles we publish. However, we are not able to respond to every comment. When we do respond it may be via a reply to a comment posted under the original article. Occasionally we may single out a comment and reply with a separate post as we did with the recent “Discussions with Our Readers” columns cited above.

World-Outlook subscribers, now over 200, are notified by email when a new article is published. However, readers are only notified of comments on an article if they themselves post a comment and check the box provided to be informed of other comments.

We inquired with WordPress, the company that hosts our site. We found there is no setting that can enable notifications to all subscribers when a comment is posted on an article. If a reader chooses to post a comment on an article, that reader can enable notifications of comments posted by others, on that specific article (see instructions below). The same process must be initiated for each article; it does not carry over from one article to another.

All comments are visible to all readers on each article. But you must manually return to an article after publication to see those comments, unless you have commented yourself and enabled notifications of further comments.

We would prefer readers were made aware of all comments as they appear, but WordPress does not allow for that.

We hope this clarification will encourage more readers to participate in discussing the articles we publish. We also hope that these exchanges may prompt others to subscribe.

In solidarity,
World-Outlook editors

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Instructions for Following Comments

When you leave a comment on a WordPress.com blog, you can choose to automatically receive email updates about other comments on that specific post by checking the Notify me of follow-up comments via email checkbox that appears in the comment form.

Depending on the email client you use, the notifications will look something like this:

Some World-Outlook readers are registered with WordPress.com. If so, when you enable notifications of new comments, you will receive a confirmation email from WordPress that requires a response to ensure the notification feature is activated. Readers who are not registered with WordPress need only check the box as explained above.