Sunday, September 21, 2008

A Word About Word Verification

Have you visited a blog and wanted to leave a comment only to have to identify jibberwacky "word verification"? It is cumbersome and annoying, which is why I turned off this feature when I first created my blog. Because this feature is transparent to the blog author, you may be unaware that word verification is enabled on your site. The letters are often indescernable jibberish and I cannot always read them correctly the first time. Sometimes I give up leaving a comment altogther, which isn't fair to the blog author.

What is word verification? With the recent antispam action taken by Blogger, bloggers are having to confirm that their blogs are not spammy by confirming a word verification "captcha". Do your readers a favor and disable this feature.

How do I do this, you ask? Sign into your blog, click on the Settings tab, then Comments. Scroll down to the word verification section and check "No" for the question that asks "Show word verification for comments?" If you are concerned about spam, you may choose to moderate your comments before they are posted. However, I have never experienced this problem in the past year that my blog has been active.

Thanks much for letting me vent :)

7 comments:

Deb said...

I, for one, did not know I had word verification enabled and disabled it quite by accident. Yes, it is annoying to have to apply the gibberish when attempting to leave comment.
So, you (anyone out there blogging) check out your blog and see if you have this setting enabled. If you do...get rid of it!!!
Thanks, Debra.

scrappysue said...

i turned mine off quite early in the piece too, and the world didn't cave in

Judyann said...

Thanks for the tip on the word verification. Turned mine off. Hate when you have to enter it more than once since sometimes they are difficult to read.

Country Girl said...

I need to disable it in one of my blogs. But I do get some nasty messages every now and then on my regular blog. Most recently, I got two of them from the same person when I posted about 9/11. They may have been commenting on many blogs as spam. They basically told me that if our country would stop killing everyone that disagreed with them, we'd stop getting what we deserved. Sad.

Jamie Payne said...

Thanks mom! I turned mine off when I created my blog. I truly dislike word verification and didn't want to subject my readers (all 4 of them) to it.

Roxanne Schwandt said...

Oh my gosh, Thank you so much for pointing this out! I totally didn't even know that was active on my blog either! Yuck, I turned the darn thing off. I'm going to post a quick note on my blog to send folks to you so they can also turn off their word verifications! Thanks Deb!!!!!

Lisa @ Boondock Ramblings said...

I turned mine off for one day and got spam, but I'm going to try again. I'm on typepad, so it is a little different, but not much. Mine is more annoying because you click out, thinking the comment has been posted, and then the page comes up again and says .. word verification.

Really annoying. Think I will shut it off.