The New Leaf Journal had a guestbook for the better parts of 2020 and 2021. I eventually closed the guestbook after our plugin solution for it stopped working. It only recently occurred to me, however, that we do not need a plugin to host the Guestbook. WordPress’s native comments will do just fine. Thus, I decided to revive the Guestbook at The New Leaf Journal.

Visit Guestbook.

I invite you to sign our Guestbook. You can use it to offer your thoughts on The New Leaf Journal or on some of its articles. The Guestbook is also open to suggestions. If you have longer inquiries, you can send an email.

We do not ask for your email because we do not store or send emails. Thus, you will not be notified when your Guestbook entry is posted or when I send a response. But there is a way to receive Guestbook updates. You can subscribe to our Guestbook’s RSS feed with your favorite reader.

If you do not know what this means, see my introduction to feeds and our list of all New Leaf Journal feeds.

Finally, this Guestbook page supports Webmentions. If your site supports Webmentions and you want to sign our Guestbook from the comfort of your own domain, include a link to our Guestbook in one of your posts or enter the URL of the page where your Guestbook link appears in the Webmention box below the comment form.

Below are some rules, procedures, and notes regarding the Guestbook:

  • I will personally review all Guestbook entries before publishing them.
  • I have the discretion to decline to publish a Guestbook entry for any reason or for no reason at all (note, however, that I published all non-spam entries we received in the original Guestbook, so this is unlikely to come up for legitimate posters). I will not edit Guestbook posts other than by adding relevant tags to external links.
  • I will not publish profanity or other forms of vulgarity in the Guestbook. As my esteemed colleague once noted, this is a family website.
  • I am allowing Guestbook posters to include a link in their profiles, although I will review profile links before allowing the entry.
  • I am not categorically prohibiting external links in Guestbook entries, but they will be disfavored unless they are clearly relevant to the Guestbook comment and the comment’s nexus to The New Leaf Journal. Think carefully before including external links.
  • If your comment is referencing a specific New Leaf Journal article, at least include the name of the article so that I and other Guestbook readers know what you are referencing. We have many articles, so what may be obvious to you will not necessarily be obvious to people reading your entry.
  • You can comment on other Guestbook entries, but I would not necessarily assume that people who post once will see your comment.
  • I will monitor the Guestbook for spam submission issues and make adjustments as needed.