please turn it off
Welcome to day 14 of NaBloPoMo! Can you taste the mid-point? I sure can, right on the tip of my tongue. We’re doing great, but I have a little problem.
CAPTCHA is preventing me from making awesome comments on some of your blogs.
Confession: I’m turning 50 next month. And I can’t actually read the CAPTCHA most any of the time. The letters and/or numbers are blurry and elusive. I usually have to go through 3-4 iterations before I get it right. And I’m a blogger who wants to comment, not a spammer automaton. I don’t have time for that feculence, especially during NaBloPoMo. I have blog posts to write and even more blog posts to read. If you want to see what navigating CAPTCHA is like for me, read Stephanie’s anti-CAPTCHA blog post. She’s hilarious. And I’m exasperated. CAPTCHA makes me feel old and incompetent. So I’m not doing it anymore. CAPTCHA on = No love from Stacie.
Maybe some of you don’t realize CAPTCHA is on, maybe it’s a default setting. That’s an issue with Blogger blogs, and if you click the link to Stephanie’s post, she’ll show you how shut it off. Can you check? Pretty please?
For those of you who enabled CAPTCHA intentionally, how about doing a little experiment and turning it off for the rest of NaBloPoMo? I believe you might learn that you don’t actually need the ridiculousness that is CAPTCHA. I believe you are not going to get piles of spam in your blog comments if you shut it off. And, I believe you will get more comments on your posts. Even bloggers that get a huge ton of traffic, like The Bloggess and The Pioneer Woman, don’t use CAPTCHA. Please please please turn it off.
What you absolutely do need, is an anti-spam plug-in. If you haven’t already, install one and enjoy the spam that falls directly into your spam folder as fodder for funny blog posts, like I do. I use the plug-in Akismet for WordPress, but there are a bunch of good anti-spam plugins out there. I only very rarely get a spam comment on a post. And all I have to do is mark it as spam and voila, it’s gone to my spam folder.
If you’re one of those rare individuals that have had actual problems with spam blowing up your comments, despite an anti-spam plug-in, I guess it’s ok to enable comment moderation. I don’t like that either. It kinda makes me feel like you don’t trust me.
But at least it doesn’t make me feel lame.
[hr]
You went with feculence I see. I had a big spam problem on my blogger site, but most of it got caught in my spam filter and most of it was on very old posts. Eventually I just turned off comments on those and it died down.
This made me laugh Stacie. I have trouble with my eyes — then just a few minutes ago on a post it was one of those adding one. 53 – 9 = and I wrote 41. Then when I realized my poor ‘rithmetic, I had already pressed submit and it erased all my comment. UGGHHHHH!! I did not go back and recreate my comment. I just didn’t have it in me.
Wow. That has to be the fault of a crappy programmer, right? I hate losing comments to dumb errors.
Old ladies unite against CAPTCHA!!
I agree about Captcha! It usually takes me at least three tries, and I have to re-enter my comment, url, and name each time. So annoying. I have moderation turned on, but just for the first comment by someone. After that, that person’s comment is published immediately. I wonder if that’s annoying too?
I don’t think that’s so annoying. I’ve just never put it on since I don’t seem to need it. My big issue is CAPTCHA.
I don’t know if it’s annoying, Marcie, but it does seem to make me forget about new-bloggy-finds faster. If I see “Your comment is awaiting…”, I pretty much wipe the whole conversation from my mind. It could just be me, though.
Still, it doesn’t come close to the annoying nature of CAPTCHA! It breaks my brain.
Yes! I’m not sure how long it’ll take my brain to recover. I stuck with it for a long time because I wanted to be nice…