Bloody captcha!
How can this be put gently,without offending anyone?
People who have WordPress are generally OK in terms of their readers being able to comment. The first time commenter held in the queue works well, it generally means moderation is unnecessary and I’ve not seen too many problems. Typepad was all right but their captcha was a pain. At least Tom Paine‘s captcha was.
No, it’s Blogger bloggers who are the problem. When they use neither captcha nor moderation, it’s OK. Normally. Moderation is a pain but sometimes it’s necessary. Julia uses it and I’ve no idea whatever if my comment eventually went up or didn’t.
I personally use moderation once a week only out of necessity and don’t like to do that because it distances the blogger from his/her readers.
Anyway, the issue is not really with moderation.
It’s with bloody captcha!!!
For a start, it really gets up the nose to have to squint to see most of those numbers and the way they run letters together reduces the commenting activity to purgatory. It’s really not pleasant and I wonder if the bloggers using it on Blogger are even aware how much of a pain in the butt it is to leave a comment?
What is worse is that the smarties at Google Blogger, not content with doing this to readers, then charitably wave you through if you’ve had a jolly good try. That is, you see that photo of some house number on an angle, take a guess, it’s obviously wrong and they just let the comment through.
Now think about that. First it is the utter arrogance of Google lackeys saying, “We’ve put you through hoops, now we’ll lay off you a bit because you’ve been a good boy [or girl] and played our little game.”
Then there is the fact that they’ve just let me through, having failed the captcha test. I could have been a hacker, spammer, whatever.
It doesn’t stop there. It seems there are two kinds of Google captcha. One is bearable to an extent and that is the one which is upfront. That is, when you go to comment, there is the captcha sitting there festering and you groan and know you have to do it.
The other one is evil. It gives no indication that there will be any captcha. So you leave your comment, waxing lyrical, press submit and go to click out. Suddenly up springs this captcha out of nowhere. You know that if you don’t stop and play their game, your comment you’ve taken time over is simply not going to be posted.
The number of times I’ve seen that and simply couldn’t be a***ed going through with it any more, especially after leaving a longer comment …
Seriously, reading and commenting should be fun, not a long-suffering process which drags on and on. A more recent one is the necessity to go through Disqus. It’s bad enough in the MSM but now bloggers are doing it too. Take this one:
OK, I refuse to have to go through social media to leave a comment, so I take the name and email route. However, at QM’s, Disqus has now taken to saying I can’t use that email as it is registered with them. Yes it is registered with them but it’s none of their damned business – surely that’s between QM and me whether I can comment or not.
Once I went to go into Disqus but it stopped me. So, QM will be relieved to hear I can’t comment there now, due to social media.
I do wonder if bloggers on Blogger are at all aware of what Google is doing to their readers and the mood it puts us in. Most people have a dozen or so on their blogrolls, I have over 150. Using a Reader, that’s fine, I can keep up …
… until hit by the pop-up, “you thought you’d just post a comment but we were lurking here to make the process a misery” captcha.
Bloody captcha!
Filed under: Blogging
I have noticed that you can put in any number you wish, or just miss out the number, and it lets you through (Blogger’s Captcha system that is). From time to time I turn it off, but then the requests to purchase an Asian bride or Viagra (or both – which might be necessary for full value I suppose) just become too much of a pain. The Blogger spammer mostly filters them out but the auto submission to my email annoys me. Perhaps I should just tolerate it, but then my wife may wonder why I am getting emails from matrimonialaffairs.com. It’s a pain either way. Think I’ll turn it off again and see what happens. And if I die with a knife in my neck while sleeping please show this to my wife
I think you will find that the photo part of the captcha is just google getting their OCR checked out
DQS – I do hear you, having been on Blogger. There are even some good aspects. Captcha though [the pop-up type] is the annoying one. There must be some switching mechanism.
Ivan – it certainly is – Goggle’s own PR machine has been saying similar but it doesn’t help the end user.
James Higham recently posted…Bloody captcha!
Just disabled word verification, now waiting for the nutters and viagra ads.
I sometimes struggle with Blogger’s captcha. The version at Witterings from Witney is nice and easy.
A K Haart recently posted…The Mafia and the Fascists
I turned of Captcha a while ago just to stop the misery it causes. As a previous commenter has stated Blogger does filter out most of the spam. The occasional one does get through.
Now after reading his comment I am tempted to go to Ian Hills’ blog and offer him a good price for Viagra and an introduction to a little alien lady I know who may be interested in obtaining a sample of his gametes, but that would just be silly… but then nutters like me are meant to be silly… The thing about spammers is they are probably not silly at all, because their spamming must work, otherwise they wouldn’t bother, and there is good evidence that it does work, so the real nutters are the ones who respond and make the spammers’ efforts worthwhile. I have heard (and it does seem plausible) some purposely make their offers obviously ridiculous so that they know that those people who do respond must be raging idiots or sadly mentally ill people who can be easily fleeced, having been so stupid to reply. There is, unfortunately, method in such spammers’ apparent madness. And by the way, anyone who wants an introduction to my alien lass just needs to send me a mere 1000 quid to cover the inter-planetary admin fee and she’ll be on her way to their address.
Just talking about captcha this morning and my ‘hacker’ friend tells me it is worse than useless and much easier to circumvent than is described here-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capcha
He said he was shown at university how to write a program to bypass things like that (and not in one of the ways listed in the Wiki article)
He reckons the hackers are a lot smarter than the average legitimate programmer.
So all captcha does is annoy thee and me; especially me cos I find those squiggles almost impossible to read.
JD recently posted…Bloody captcha!
I opted to get rid of catchpa on Blogger a while ago – I get spam by the cartload, weekends are the worst – but filtered out mostly and coming through both as “spam” and “awaiting moderation”.
But it’s easy enough to get rid with a couple of clicks. Only snag is that under “awaiting moderation” there can occasionally be a genuine comment buried there.
I hate Disqus too – and it’s everywhere these days – I somehow got listed on that under my real name as I was floundering around on it. Ah well, it’ll make it easier for ‘em to round me up when the revolution fails.
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Don, please send me your bank details (Card number and sort code) and I will transfer the £1000.
@Pete:
What is really annoying is when the button to press after you typed in the stuff is not visible and you have to ask for another set of numbers and hope it will be this time. grr..