Good comments, generally speaking, are brief and to the point, of interest to Shorpy visitors, and are about the photograph that is the subject of the post. Although it's hard to generalize much about good comments, we can say specifically what makes a comment likely to be deleted:

• Big huge text blocks copied from other sites. Please use a link instead. And in the case of Wikipedia, you probably don't even need a link. People know how to do a Wikipedia (Google, Yahoo, etc.) search. Mini encyclopedia articles with lots of links to various sites -- not really what we want either.

• Comments full of emoticons :( and excess punctuation. (!!!!) Which would include those ultra-annoying comments that .... for whatever mysterious reason .... use ellipses instead of periods ....

• COMMENTS AND SUBJECT LINES WRITTEN IN ALL CAPS or all lowercase without any punctuation at all please do not do this

• Comments that belabor the obvious or repeat information from a previous comment.

• Annoying comments. Which are often attempts to "correct" a previous commenter.

• Comments that call men "gentlemen." A middlebrow affectation that's one of your webmaster's many pet peeves.

• Comments that begin Is it just me, or --

• Comments that pose unanswerable questions, or questions with obvious or easily looked-up answers.

• Comments full of misspelled words ("definately").

• Comments where "Title of your comment" is not filled in. Which means extra work for the webmaster.

• Do you not know the difference between "were" and "where"? (Sigh.)

• Or the difference between its and it's? (It's = it is or it has: It's a nice day; it's been fun. For all other uses (the possessive pronoun) it's "its": The car lost its wheel. And while we're at it, the plural of "photo" is photos, not photo's.

• Too many comments. There are 20 spots in the "Recent Comments" list. Please don't push everyone else off the homepage by posting 10 comments at once.

• Comments that break the layout of the page, either with huge long URLs or pictures too wide for the Comments box. Long URLs can be embedded in your comments with HTML tags, or made shorter with a service like tinyurl. Images should not be wider than 490 pixels. You can use width="490" in an img tag to make oversize pictures fit. In any case please use the "Preview" button when submitting a comment to make sure your post will not break the page.