An Open Letter to Blogger Bloggers

9th December 2007

An Open Letter to Blogger Bloggers

posted in General by themaiden |

Blogger bloggers please don’t make me login with my Google/Blogger account in order to post a comment. I realize that this is spam control, but find some other solution– like, oh, migrate to WordPress :). Sincerely, though, you are losing traffic. Why? Every time I want to post on a Blogger blog and I have to login with my Google/Blogger account I have to look up the damned password. Then I get frustrated with you, with Blogger, with your blog.

See, I thought I’d play nice and I got myself a Blogger account back before it was Google. I thought I’d play nice and get an account just so that I’d be able to post comments on those must-have-a-blogger-account blogs. It has been a constant source of irritation.

And have you considered those folks who don’t have a Google/Blogger account? Really, there has to be a better way to control spam than to force people to sign up for a damned Blogger account.

While I’m at it, some of you are also missing out on trackbacks. Those ‘create a link’ buttons that only link to Google/Blogger Blogs mean that your chances of my linking to you go down by at least 50%. And show your trackbacks– Blogger calls them ‘backlinks’. Trackbacks are a kind of reciprocation. Play nice.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, December 9th, 2007 at 9:14 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1 On December 9th, 2007, ohwilleke said:

At one point I was seriously considering migrating from blogger. New blogger software solved the most egregious problems, like a lack of tagging, even though it comes with other problems.

So, now I allow anonymous and nickname posting (FWIW, I far prefer nickname posting because when multiple anonymous commenters get in a conversation in the comments it gets confusing), but do require confirmation codes for comments.

I’d like to be able to close old comments which are the only ones that get significant spam that I don’t catch, but it is still good enough to keep spam at a controlled level.

The trackbacks function has never worked well on blogger, but with Technorati and sitemeter (another overrated tool), I manage well enough to figure out whose mentioning my posts.

2 On December 9th, 2007, jmb said:

I’m hoping that Blogger change this thing, which sure is annoying. But here’s an observation. When I sign in to Wordpress blogs who use wordpress.com, it recognizes my Wordpress ID (which I have for various reasons, one of which is I am trialling a wordpress blog) and links to my wordpress ID and not my blogger blog and so I am forced to leave my URL in the comments, just the way others are in blogger.

There is a lot of hype in blogs at the moment about the Open ID thing overcoming the blogger problem but at the moment I don’t understand the Open ID thing. I’m waiting for the clever people to sort it all out.

3 On December 9th, 2007, Ylooshi said:

I just migrated two blogs to Wordpress after Blogger deleted one of my blogs due to “link-spam.”

Since there was no such spam on my blog, all posts were original and all links were to legitimate sites & blogs, I clicked the “restore my blog” link and get a message that says Blogger will review my blog and take care of it in a day or so. Over a week later I still haven’t heard anything.

If you have a Blogger blog, you would do well to archive your site. I like Wordpress better anyway now that I’ve used it for a few days.

4 On December 9th, 2007, themaiden said:

jmb,

I don’t mind typing my URL in the comment form. In fact, I’m complaining about blogs that won’t let me do that.

I’ve got an OpenID. I started looking into that project but got sidetracked so I can’t say much about it. Off the top of my head, though, it seems like a good idea.

5 On December 9th, 2007, themaiden said:

Ylooshi,

That is a wee bit scary. I’ve heard similar complaints, though, but I won’t repeat them as they are second hand.

6 On December 9th, 2007, esvl said:

I agree, I have stopped commenting on blogger blogs. If they want comments they should use something where you can actually leave a real comment.

7 On December 10th, 2007, Bob King said:

It’s quite possible to configure Blogger in a non-hostile way, and I believe that I’ve done that with Graphictruth. For a while, I had Haloscan commenting, but it was far harder to manage, and it’s trackback facility was even clumsier than using a standalone utility.

I do miss trackback, but not enough to go to the trouble of migrating my blog, with all the attendant hassles. What I did do was migrate from having graphictruth hosted on my own space to having it hosted on Blogger, to speed up posting and to make use of what I think is Blogger’s best feature, the ability to quickly modify the template with powerful macros.

Anyway, give my comments a try. As far as I know, the only impediment is the captcha, and of course the fact that I review each comment. I filter spam manually rather than relying on tools that aren’t smart enough to do the job properly.

8 On December 10th, 2007, jameshigham said:

But HH, once you’ve logged in once, it automatically logs you in whatever Blogger site you go to. This is the beauty of it. Unless you work for Hell of course.

9 On December 10th, 2007, themaiden said:

You’re right, Bob. It is possible to configure Blogger nicely. That is all I’m asking, really. I can think of a number of Blogger blogs that are just fine.

Captcha has a reputation for being user unfriendly, but I don’t mind it much– except for those few cases where the writing is so obscure that it takes me four tries to get it.

I don’t know how to do it with Blogger but Askimet is very, very effective at catching spam. Error rates are probably one in a hundred or better here at Hell’s Handmaiden.

And Haloscan… I rarely encounter that system without leaving a bad taste in my mouth.

10 On December 10th, 2007, themaiden said:

james,

I’m sure that works just fine for people who use Blogger as a matter of course. Not everyone uses Blogger and not everyone wants to sign up for a Blogger account just to post comments. And not everyone who has bothered to get an account is happy about having to use it. Honestly, I’ve started checking the comment form on Blogger blogs and if I can’t post via name/email/url the chances that I’ll post the comment at all go down 75%. Comments are precious for a blog. Why someone would make them so weirdly elitist and difficult is beyond me.