Are You Losing Out by Making it too Hard for Some to Leave Comments?

Will you disable to help the disabled?

A message from The Zoolatry Girls on behalf of their Human, and others:

 

You may not know there are a number of active bloggers who live with some form of disability.  For example, Carly ~ the human owned by TIA of CUDDLES and CATNIP suffers from blindness, making blog visiting and commenting often difficult.  Our own ML ~ who is managed by KC and the SHERWOOD BUNCH has continuing back problems which often prevent her from sitting at a computer for any length of time.  And Ann, the Zoolatry Human, has hand tremors which affect her typing ability more often than not.  For each of us, and for many others, commenting can be difficult ~ especially if we must also complete "word verification", type in our email address, or type in our blog link ~ all before being allowed to comment.

Once upon a time, in the early days of Google Blogspot, word verification and such were the only controls we all had against "spam".  How, Blogspot offers automatic spam control.  We're not sure how WordPress or other blog sites work ~ but all in all, it will be a really big help to many of us if you can "disable to help the disabled".  Certainly, word verification no longer provides any protection to your blog and could easily be removed from your settings.  And perhaps there are other elements that could also be removed.  Check it out.

 

Many of us would love to comment more often, but we are either slowed down, or hindered or stopped entirely by these added controls.

So ~ please take a look at the current settings for your blog.  Are they really needed?  Please consider updating these settings, if you are comfortable doing so ~ it will help!  Thanks!

Here are my thoughts on the subject:

On Typepad we have the option for "Unauthenticated Commenters" who don't use their social site ID's to sign in, to...

Require readers to enter a randomly generated verification code.... or not.

On reflection, after many years of comfort with the code, Nikita, & I, are willing to check "Or Not" so as to remove this step, from Musngs, and Meowsings, for this reason:

We have the ability to read the comment before we approve it for posting.

The e-mail requirement will still be there, for now,  for those not using Social Site ID's, unless we see that removing it doesn't cause the Spambots to flock to us like Cats flock to a stash of Catnip. ;-D

Aside from OpenID, there are 10 Social Site ID's you can use:

Typepad

Facebook

Twitter

Google

MySpace

Yahoo

AOL/AIM

Blogger

LiveJournal

Word Press

With 9 years experience blogging on 4 blogs, I learned years ago, of the scourge that are the spammers, and even as technology improved in the battle, I just felt comfy with the extra steps because it cut down drastically on the number of spam comments I have to deal with on a daily basis.

In our spam Filters, of Trackbacks (TB's) caught by Typepad, on my 2 oldest blogs, and this one, there are thousands of spam that never reached the stage of my needing to see them, going back  years, it's just that Typepad has never developed a way to empty the stash:

2 Non-Active Blogs: 56,000 TB's, and 42,800 TB's.

Musings of a Mad Macedonian = 20,391 

Luckily Meowsings doesn't get many Spam TB's so it's easy to manage, and rescue good ones.

Recent developements, in the system, allow us to empty, easily, the Comment Spam Filter on this, and his, blog.

As of this morning we both get only a few spam Comments a day, if any, most caught without our knowledge by the system, so we can easily double check to make sure a good comment was not treated as spam.