29 March, 2013

To my commenters

You may have noticed that I've had to resort to introducing a word verification step to commenting on my blog.  I resisted as long as I could, but eventually the spammers beat Blogger's excellent spam-detecting mechanisms, and obscene comments were appearing on some of my posts.  Mostly on an old post, I will admit, but I still don't want readers coming across them accidentally.

I've kept the ability to comment anonymously, as I've received some really lovely and moving comments from anonymous commenters.  I know how hard it is to put your name (or even a pseudonym) to something that is so deeply personal, especially in the early, painful, raw days.  And so I want to be able to keep this facility as long as possible.

For those of you who hate word verification, you are not alone.  I posted this on A Separate Life last year.  But equally I hate the sites that restrict me to logging on with disqus, or only allow openid  or wordpress (for some reason I come up as aseparatelife rather than Mali, and it doesn't always allow me to link to my blogger blog), so I'm going to stick with this for now.

I think it's a case of damned if I don't, and damned if I do.  So if you're annoyed at this - feel free to curse at me.  As long as you manage to comment.  If you can't, or have difficulty, please email me!

6 comments:

  1. Actually, thanks to this I just checked my settings. In my main blog, I don't allow anonymous commenters, but I don't use word verification and for posts older than 14 days, I use comment moderation.

    I just realized that I have word verification for my IF blog!!! LOL!!! I don't necessarily like word verification, but I understand the necessity! :-D

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  2. dear Mali,
    I am checking if it is easy to comment...

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    Replies
    1. yes, it is easy. Not a problem :)

      Have a beautiful day!

      Delete
  3. I don't mind (although sometimes the numbers are hard to read and it takes a couple of trys!)... I've always retained the power to review comments, so I understand!

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  4. I didn't use either word verification or anonymous comments, 'til I wrote a sensitive post in which an anonymous comment was left, very horrible, nastiest I had ever seen. After that, both are up. I don't like it, knowing that I'd have less comments- but I don't see any options like you had, Mali...

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  5. Every once and a while (more so when we were in the adoption process), I see a blogger go private due to getting "spammed" with bad comments. Hopefully it is just one or two and you don't have to go to such drastic measures.

    Oddly enough, only one or two of those adoption bloggers keep going today. Most got their kids...and then stopped. Well, we are not doing the kid thing...and keep it going...even if it is not as often as I would like.

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