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Blogger Comments

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Clarissa

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OK, people, I’m now officially giving up on trying to leave comments at Blogger blogs. Blogger has introduced this bizarre system of comment verification where you have to guess a weird combination of letters and then reproduce it. Here are some examples:

 

or

 

or

 

It takes forever to decipher these weird inscriptions and, more often than not, I need more than 2 tries to get them right. Sometimes, you just want to support a blogger by leaving a comment that you like the post or agree with what the blogger says. But such a short comment isn’t really worth the trouble of straining your eye-sight and damaging your brain to analyze this strange collection of letters.

So if you blog at Blogger and are wondering where your commenters have gone, please know: we still like you but we are prevented from participating by this obnoxious system.

23 responses to “Blogger Comments”

  1. Heather Avatar
    Heather

    I had the same problem at Blogger. I find WordPress to be so much better! The only problem is that I have trouble putting AdSense ads on my blog 😦

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    1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
      bloggerclarissa

      You need to contact the WordPress team and they will give you a code that will enable you to turn on AdSense: http://en.support.wordpress.com/advertising/

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  2. Sarah Avatar
    Sarah

    I totally agree, I hate it. I have a Blogger blog but use Disqus for the comments which doesn’t have that annoying word verification system.

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    1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
      bloggerclarissa

      I like the commenting system here at WordPress because it allows me to accept a commenter once after which s/he can post as many comments as s/he likes without any moderation and verification. Of course, at huge blogs this system might be problematic.

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  3. David Bellamy Avatar
    David Bellamy

    I think the word verification system is optional. It is not in place unless the blogger activates it, unless something has changed. Bloggers activate this to avoid spam comments, of course. My blog is not very popular, but even I get spam comments sometimes.

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  4. E (The Third Glance) Avatar
    E (The Third Glance)

    I’m right there with you – I keep trying, but it often literally takes me 5+ tries to leave the damn comment. And it’s just frustrating. I actually really like wordpress because you have the option to put in any identity you would like, if you’re NOT a blogger already, which is amazing.

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    1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
      bloggerclarissa

      I think autism is partly the reason why I find this so frustrating. I literally feel my brain hurt when I see these captchas.

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      1. E (The Third Glance) Avatar
        E (The Third Glance)

        Yes, seriously! I can’t deal with them. And its not just blogger either. There used to be really neat things that they did with those things – a giant crowd-sourcing project that was used to digitize old scans of old books. They’d have one of the 2 words be computer generated and known, and the other be the scanned image. Then when you typed in the words, you were judged by the computer as having gotten its one right, and assumed that the other is right. Get 10 or 50 or more people to put in their best guess for the 2nd word, and you’ve digitized it. I thought that project was really cool. But now it’s just insane and the project doesn’t seem to exist anymore, and instead the stupid captchas or whatever they’re called exist to make my brain hurt. I hate the things. But I thought you might be interested in knowing that at one point, they actually played a really big part in helping to digitize and immortalize knowledge. 🙂

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      2. n8chz Avatar
        n8chz

        Somehow helping make house numbers machine-readable sounds not as public-spirited as doing the same for books (and even seems somehow sinister), and even with the books, I don’t entirely trust Google to be the world’s librarian.

        Also on my list of Blogger commenting gripes:

        * Must comment using a Blogger account to get email comment subscriptions.
        * Even with a Blogger account, sometimes there is no way to get the checkbox (or in some cases link; there are multiple versions of Blogger’s commenting engine in circulation…) without previewing the comment.
        * If I type a comment and then realize I’m not logged in on Blogger/Google, I’ve learned the hard way that I’d better copy that comment into a text editor (or at least the clipboard) before taking Blogger up on the “you will be prompted for login later” promise, as comments tend to get eaten there.

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        1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
          bloggerclarissa

          Yes, the stupid thing eats comments like crazy!

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  5. el Avatar
    el

    At first I thought you were polling readers which comment verification type to install on your blog. 🙂 So glad I was wrong!

    I see letters easily, however, had a problem with IE browser displaying incorrectly (only a half) of picture puzzles. Dragging parts to compose a picture is annoying.

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    1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
      bloggerclarissa

      No, I would never inflict this suffering on my readers! I’d rather just weed out spam manually.

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  6. luna Avatar
    luna

    Yes! Absolutely! So true!

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    1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
      bloggerclarissa

      And you see? You cod leave this comment on MY blog easily. Which is the entire purpose of commenting systems.

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  7. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    Does my blog require that? I thought not, but then I can comment myself if I am logged in as myself.

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    1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
      bloggerclarissa

      These were all taken from your blog, actually. 😦

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      1. Jonathan Avatar
        Jonathan

        I’m going to try to fix that, then.

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      2. Jonathan Avatar
        Jonathan

        Because I’m irritated when I have to do it on others’ blogs. It always takes me several attempts.

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      3. Jonathan Avatar
        Jonathan

        I’ve turned off word verification for both blogs. Now you shouldn’t have to type in those awful, illegible words.

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        1. bloggerclarissa Avatar
          bloggerclarissa

          Cool! Guessing should have no place in blog commenting.

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  8. the twisted spinster Avatar
    the twisted spinster

    As someone above pointed out, it’s optional for the blog owner. There’s also a thing you can click on to hear the code? I’ve never tried it because I mostly like my internet experience to be seen and not heard, so I don’t know if it works better.

    But yes, I hate it too, because I often can’t decipher the letters. Unfortunately I have the sad feeling that until we have the foolproof ability to identify spambots things like this will continue to clutter the internet and make it generally more difficult.

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  9. Melissa Avatar
    Melissa

    Soooo glad it’s not just me!

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  10. musteryou Avatar
    musteryou

    I’ve eliminated any moderation or reading tests I may have had on my blog. I had a persistent troll once, that caused me to introduce some barriers, because those were the days of George Bush, and people believed anything trolls said back then, and wrote the words on their hearts.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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