First off, I find the capcha word sign in very annoying. Often it is difficult to even make out the words and I feel as though maybe I am a robot after all. Then it used to be only one word and now it is two! Being the persistent person I am and wanting to really leave a comment, I put up with it and haven't said a thing about it until now.
Secondly, I find the Disqus comment thing annoying. It sometimes takes awhile for it to set to let me type in my comment and sometimes, if I'm in a rush like before work, I won't bother. However, usually, I will put up with this too.
Finally, to my great disappointment, I am finding Wordpress blogs that require a "sign in" to comment using my Twitter or Facebook accounts. Can we make commenting any harder? Do these people really want comments. I'm thinking that they get too many and want to weed some out. I think this may be the case over at Should Be Reading where I participate in a weekly Tuesday Teaser. Every week there are around 300 comments with people leaving their links to their teasers but this week there were 180. When I went to leave mine this week, I was disappointed to find I couldn't. I even jumped through the hoops and tried signing in using my Twitter account and it STILL did not work! I am so frustrated by this! Frankly, I don't want third parties having access to either of these accounts.
Please, I beg you, if you are a blogger, make it easy to comment if you want comments! Here is the comment I tried to leave about my Tuesday Teaser that I couldn't:
We have a historical fiction and a Christian fiction book this week: http://www.ourstack.blogspot.com/2012/03/tuesday-teasers-crown-and-deceit.html
(50 cents per legitimate comment during March goes to The American Cancer Society by sponsoring Mrs 4444 and Lucky Lady in The Race For Life.)
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12 comments:
Thank you for saying this, Karen! I was a guest speaker on blogging in a Journalism class at Lehigh Monday. I told the students to NEVER do 3 things:
1. Use CAPTCHA
2. Moderate comments (unless absolutely necessary)
3. Use a very dark background.
I hate captcha because I never get it right on the first try anymore. I find I'm refreshing the words up to 4 times now before I see a set of words I think I can decipher. What a pain!
I also won't move to DISQUS because of the reason you specify. I'm also afraid it will muck up my past comments if I switch. I'm happy with the way I take comments now on my blog. No sense messing it up.
Have a great day!
I just stopped moderating and turned off my CAPTCHA a couple of weeks ago. I really like the ease of it, but I'm not allowing anon comments to keep out the spam and have had one wordpresser say she can't comment.
I can't STAND this new Captcha. Even the old Blogger Captchas, while were a pain, were more readable. I felt like such a failure trying to see those blasted things. I don't feel so bad, now.
Disqus is uncomfortable to use, I agree. I think bloggers, as a rule, should occasionally leave comments on their blogs to see what it's like for other folks. It does help.
Most of my blogs are Wordpress blogs. I use a special Captcha plugin on them, but it's for "bots." If the plugin thinks the commenter is a bot, it will ask for a Captcha. Ptherwise, most of my visitors don't notice it (I hope). Those plugins are hard to test because it already detects ME as a non-spammer.
Spam is a big problem for blogs these days. For several months, I was getting over 1,000 spam comments A DAY for EVERY blog I own. I had to install a spam Captcha. All those spam comments can overwhelm a blog and cause it to crash for a long, long time. Knowing this, I am more tolerant of Captchas and do not complain, but I don't like Blogger's new look.
Yep, these things drive me up the wall too. I try to make it as easy as possible and even allow anonymous comments. No word verification either.
Have a terrific day. :)
I wonder why they changed the visuals for the Captcha comments anyway?
GREAT post, Karen! I feel exactly like you on all three. I thought it was just me with the Disqus--I just don't have time to wait for it to load. Ugh.
Yeah, there are a couple of WP blogs that seem to not let me comment even when I'm logged in.
I hat jumping throught those hoops as well. I may remome the comment moderation,but I will not allow anon commentors.
I totally agree with you on the comments. Capcha is the most annoying to me. The new lettering is almost impossible to read sometimes.
I haven't used word verification in over a year and also got rid of the Anonymous comments. I rarely get spam and when I do it goes to the spam folder.
Kathy--I like you comment plug-in. Never have a problem with it and like that it shows a link to my post. I tried installing commenLuv on my blos about two years ago and couldn't figure out how to get it to work right so gave up. I have my limits as to how much time I waste working on my blogs. Glad to see you agree with me here.
Ma--it seems Blogger throws the anonymous comments into moderation. Most are spam but once in awhile someone I actually know who doesn't blog will leave a comment using that option so I keep it.
Rebecca: I don't get much spam on my blogs--so glad! It's such a nuisance and waste of time! To test your plug-in, try including a link in the comment. If I do that when commenting, that's when I get the little spam test. Otherwise, I don't get it.
Sandee: Yes, your blog is very comment friendly. I never had any trouble leaving you comments.
Daisy: Who knows. Maybe it's part of a scheme to get people to stop commenting.
Lin: Thank you! I didn't think I was the only one bothered by these things and like hearing that mamy of my readers agree with me about this. Now, if we could just find a solution!
Sharkbytes: Glad I'm not the only one having this problem. I thought I was doing something wrong. I even signed in to the gravitar.com site and still couldn't leave my comment. I feel like I'm being shut out.
Mike: I've gone back and forth about allowing anonymous to comment here and decided to leave it since I don't get too many and sometimes someone I actually know who doesn't blog will use that option.
SquirrelQueen: Hope you feel better knowing you're not the only one who has trouble reading the CAPCHA letters--Sometimes I'm surprised when I guess right on the first try!
Here's a subject that really strikes a cord with people!!! I totally agree with you about both the word verification and Disqus.
They are both inconvenient. I don't have any hoops to jump through, yet occasionally people can't leave their comments in spite of it. My reaction to that is ------ well, it's free and it isn't perfect-----and I shouldn't be so needy about comments. But I am, anyway.
Amen! I can't figure out why this happens, but there are a handful of posts that simply never publish my comments. I have no idea what is wrong with their comment forms, but it's happened to me a handful of times. It's not only frustrating as the commenter, but I'm frustrated FOR them too...because I know they'd get more comments if they simplified their system.
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