A while back I lamented my difficulties in posting comments on my own blog. I've now developed a work-around that involves using a VPN services and switching among web browsers. This morning I had to hop through VPN connections in several different countries using three different browsers to post a brief response to a kind comment from a visitor.
I believe the difficulty may arise from Blogger's attempts to reduce spam on the platform. For some reason, it has identified me as spamming my own blog; I suspect this is because I had the habit of posting links in the comments, which must be a spammer trait. This explains the curious phenomenon of links disappearing from the comment fields on a number of recent posts. So I've begun putting the links in the blog text.
So why the VPN use? It may be that my IP address has become associated with spam, even though I have never posted spam in my life (honest!).
I know that some of you have had trouble posting comments here. This could be for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it has to do with being logged in to the Google account you are trying to comment from. It could also involve how your browser is configured. You may need to enable third-party cookies on the blogspot site. This article from Microsoft may help.
In its zeal to control spam, Google has a spam filter in Blogger similar to the one in Gmail. I didn't know about the Blogger filter until my friend Ernie brought it to my attention. I never even thought about it because I can count on two hands the number of spam comments I've received over the years. It's easy enough to delete them when they turn up.
When I did finally examine the Blogger spam folder, I found about 200 comments there, two of which were actually spam - meaning that the filter has about a 1% success rate. Meanwhile, dozens and dozens of your legitimate comments never appeared on the blog! My apologies for this oversight on my part. I will keep watch over the folder from now on. If you have had trouble commenting in the past, please try again!
I mentioned Gmail's spam filter. It does from time to time unaccountably send the email notifications of your comments to its spam folder. This has happened repeatedly with one regular commenter, even though I have assured the software over and over that he is not a spammer.
But enough of the complaining. Instead, let me conclude by thanking everyone for all your comments and support through the years!
1 comment:
It can be very, very frustrating. I think Google chooses to no longer support Blogger, and thus does not care that it's broken. I only hope they keep it going for the foreseeable future instead of sun-setting it like so many products that didn't turn out as successfully as they would have liked. I wonder if Wordpress works better? I'd hate to imagine trying to move my blog, I had a hard enough time switching it to their new hit tracking system... :(
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