It has come to my attention (the hard way) that Blogger has started using an insane new style of captcha. The sound version is incomprehensible and the written one may take a dozen tries to get through. I don't have captchas turned on for this blog (I never usually get comments anyway, and moderation is turned on for any post over 14 days) but if you do, you might like to check that, depending on the number of comments you get; if you have "word verification" enabled, it might well deter human commenters.
I was quite surprised, checking the settings, that moderation isn't particularly granular; unlike other systems, there's no way, for example, to specify you want to moderate commenters for the first post or two, after which they're considered ok. Moderation is either always on, or based on age of post (by default, posts aged over 14 days). If you have a high-traffic blog, that makes moderation almost useless to keep spam at bay, leaving word verification as your only option. I have a nasty (and rather cynical, but not necessarily incorrect) feeling that this particularly user-unfriendly captcha is a ploy by Google to get people to take anti-spam measures off their blogs - as making money through spamming is what Google is all about.
Edit: I've had a Google fan point me at a link to Google's new no-captcha captcha system, which sounds grand in principle but clearly is not fully operational. It's still not clear why I was presented with a captcha in the first place as I was logged in, commenting on a blog where I'd commented before, and the post was a recent one.
Wednesday, 15 April 2015
Sunday, 15 December 2013
Looking better
It's bizarre. I don't know what's happened to WordPress. A few years ago, when LiveJournal was bought out by the Russians, a lot of people started looking for a new blogging platform. At the time, Blogger was a bit of a joke, buggy and awful to use. WordPress was fast, sleek, and while it definitely had a learning curve, it was worth it for the range of options it gave you. Once it was set up, the interface was straightforward, and away you went.
Not any more. It's a couple of years since I set up a WordPress blog, and it's gone south during that time. I'd been aware of the interface getting worse for a while; I was never quite sure when clicking on something would catapult me out of the dashboard and into the guts of wordpress.com, from whence I'd struggle to get back. They're obviously losing out to Tumblr now, as the basic options are pretty dire, and they're heavily pushing paid options, even for fairly basic customisations. Custom CSS has always been a cost option, fair enough, but the free themes always used to have a range of customisable settings. It seems far more restricted now, and a lot of the themes are downright ugly.
Last year, someone told me about Weebly and I had a play. It's ok, with a very basic point-and-click interface aimed at people who know nothing about HTML, but it's aimed at people wanting websites, not blogs. This month I've been corraling blogs from all over the place, and transfering them to one WordPress account, only to find that setting up a blog there is now painful, and not really worth the effort.
So I thought I'd have a go at Blogger again. And - well. Google have obviously been working on it since they bought it. There's a fairly restricted set of themes, but most of them don't look too bad, and they are all easily customisable in a manner reminiscent of the old LJ setup - colours and fonts all available to change, along with column layouts and widths. Custom CSS provided free. Much as Google do appear to have gone to the dark side, they've done a very nice job in resurrecting Blogger. It's certainly a lot less hassle setting up a blog here now.
Not any more. It's a couple of years since I set up a WordPress blog, and it's gone south during that time. I'd been aware of the interface getting worse for a while; I was never quite sure when clicking on something would catapult me out of the dashboard and into the guts of wordpress.com, from whence I'd struggle to get back. They're obviously losing out to Tumblr now, as the basic options are pretty dire, and they're heavily pushing paid options, even for fairly basic customisations. Custom CSS has always been a cost option, fair enough, but the free themes always used to have a range of customisable settings. It seems far more restricted now, and a lot of the themes are downright ugly.
Last year, someone told me about Weebly and I had a play. It's ok, with a very basic point-and-click interface aimed at people who know nothing about HTML, but it's aimed at people wanting websites, not blogs. This month I've been corraling blogs from all over the place, and transfering them to one WordPress account, only to find that setting up a blog there is now painful, and not really worth the effort.
So I thought I'd have a go at Blogger again. And - well. Google have obviously been working on it since they bought it. There's a fairly restricted set of themes, but most of them don't look too bad, and they are all easily customisable in a manner reminiscent of the old LJ setup - colours and fonts all available to change, along with column layouts and widths. Custom CSS provided free. Much as Google do appear to have gone to the dark side, they've done a very nice job in resurrecting Blogger. It's certainly a lot less hassle setting up a blog here now.
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