Monday, March 05, 2012

Blogger is vexing me

My blog platform, it seems, is conspiring to kill off what little comment thread activity I have left - first by infiltrating a gremlin into the word-recognition security feature, such that it won't approve any comments (at least, if you're trying to use the 'Preview' feature; I was told that, originally, it was still OK if you dispensed with trying to 'preview' your comment), then by introducing a pointless and offputtingly ugly 'new look' for the comment window, and then by inexplicably choosing to remove the 'notify me of new comments by e-mail' facility.  All rather galling.  And unfathomably stupid.

I have been deluged with complaints about all of this (well, five people have e-mailed me; that counts as a lot on this blog!) over the past week or so.  Therefore, I have - reluctantly - decided to disable the word-verification feature for a while.

Doubtless, the perversely resourceful techies at Blogger will find some new way to frustrate attempts to comment. And I'll soon be inundated in spam.


But commenting has been so QUIET on here lately, even spam might be quite diverting for a while.


2 comments:

JES said...

I do hope you take to replying to the spammers. Especially the ones who may live in your neighborhood.

Google/Blogger seems to have fine-tuned the comment window, so that it no longer pops up full-screen (with the preview wrapping around the text box where the comment's entered/edited). But the whole word-verif thing is still munged. If you enter the "phrase" correctly and select Preview, you've still got to enter a NEW phrase at the time you publish, even if you haven't made any changes.

(I've also noticed that the "preview" doesn't preview everything. In particular, it doesn't display italics.)

But maybe I should stop complaining. After almost four years, my blog still doesn't have a comment preview feature at all.

Froog said...

No italics? That is odd. I don't use the 'Preview' feature often, but I thought it was displaying bold and italic text just fine. The gremlins are running amok!

Yes, shame on you, JES! How do you expect your readers to get by without a 'preview' facility?!