Word Verification: Bollocks

Hmmm. I had noticed that spam comments on this blog had increased noticeably recently, roughly coinciding with Google's introduction of the new Captcha word verification system. Now I see why:

Google’s Blogger service, already one of the largest sources of spam blogs on the Web, is now being innundated with another wave of spammers following the cracking of the Google CAPTCHA system. This means that spammers can now fully automate the process of creating and setting up new Blogger spam blogs, making the process even faster and enabling the creation of more spam blogs than ever before.

Source.

Yup, that sounds like it. In response to many negative comments, both directly to me and in other blogs, I am turning off word verification for a while. It's putting people off responding to blog posts, and since comments and debate are the whole pleasure and point of blogging in the first place, it is totally self-defeating.

I'll keep an eye on the spam. If it gets unmanageable, I will have to reinstate WV, but I am going to ride bareback for a while.

Please keep the comments coming. It's lonely here without the voices.


UPDATE: Thanks to eagle-eyed, square-jawed fighter ace Endemoniada_88, who spotted that the source referred to is from 2008. So the contents of this post may well be as per title, as per ushual.

Blogger back

The program or the person, who cares?

I was having problems with Blogger over the last few days. Curiously, they were exactly the same problem as I have been having with my work PC over many months now. I go to my blog and get the sign-in page. I sign in as normal and get taken to the Dashboard, where I can 'New Post', 'View Blog' etc. I usually go the blog and have a look around before doing anything else, and if I click 'View Blog' I get straight back to the blog main page, with 'Sign In' at the top right - that is, I have been signed out. If I go directly to 'New Post' I can write a post and publish, but as soon as I go back to the blog itself I am signed out again. This means I cannot comment on my own or anyone else's blog under my own login. Hence a lot of comments by 'Richard At Work' below the line on GFGN. And doing anything to the blog's design is out too.

The work PC seems to have cured itself, although I haven't posted much from there recently. Days have been too busy, and with all the ructions about pay cuts and shift changes there has been too much 'debate' at night, which always takes place in the office where the PC is. Not conducive to sly worktime blogging at all.

A couple of days ago the problem started on my netbook. I did all the usual (cursed, loudly, stamped my feet, threatened to throw it out of the window, even went back to a previous restore point) to no avail. Five minutes ago, I cured it. I found a site which dealt with Blogger issues, and read there that Blogger puts cookies on your PC to keep sessions open. Well, of course it does ... and then I remembered that, a few days ago, I had had a fit of privacy tremors, and had disabled third party cookies in my browser. Normal cookies were still enabled, but I went back and 'allowed' thirty party cookies. Problem solved. Why third party cookies are essential to Blogger's functioning is a mystery, but to be honest, as long as it is working I couldn't care less.

---

Additionally, a number of people have complained about the new 'captcha' feature for comments. I have noticed this on other blogs I visit, and I assume it is an 'enhancement' from Blogger. I certainly didn't request it, and I find it irritating and intrusive. I understand that there have been a lot of complaints about it, so perhaps Blogger will take that on board and revert to the previous, and perfectly adequate, system. If not, I will disable it and put up with the extra spam that it is designed to prevent. Having said that, I have had more spam on the blog in the last couple of weeks that in the whole of the previous year, so whatever it is, it clearly isn't working.

I'll give it a week.

Hiatus ...

... or pause, or lacuna, or whatever you like to call it. I'm having trouble signing in to Blogger, so if you don't hear from me I haven't cashed in my chips. I'm just sitting here in Nowhere Towers chewing through the straps in frustration. If this post gets published, there is a roundabout way to post, although not to log in, strangely.

Stay with it.

Formatting Horribleness

An apology. When I post from work (as with the previous post), I am in a strange limbo, half-in and half-out of Blogger. I can sign in and create a new post, but as soon as it is published I am presented with the sign-in screen again. I can't comment here or anywhere else under my own identity, and I can't edit my own posts. In this limbo, Blogger takes liberties with my formatting (about which I am usually quite careful, as I like to keep the blog looking clean), putting several paragraph breaks on one side of a quote and none on the other, and line breaks in the middle of lines where there shouldn't be any at all. Worse, I can't get back in to edit or correct any of it. The infelicities have to stay until I get home and can access the blog on my regular machine (modest though it is) to put them right.

So if you see a post on here with odd formatting and lots of stupid errors, please accept my humblest, and I will be tidying them up later.

If I am awake.

Apologies

I'm working nights at the moment, and trying to post and respond to comments from my work computer. It's proving difficult. If you can read this, then I am able to write new posts, but I can't log in to comment. For those with Blogger accounts, if I click on 'Sign In' at the top of the page I am taken to the dashboard. I can click 'New Post' and write a new post, but if I click 'View Blog' I am taken back to the 'Sign In' page.

I think it must be the way the work PC is set up. It's always been awkward managing the blog from here. For one thing, it won't allow copy/paste unless I am working in html, which makes handling images a bit of a carry-on, and switching between html and 'compose' modes plays havoc with the formatting, with line breaks breeding like flies. I don't get the problem at home, so I assume it is a feature of the workplace machine (there are plenty of others).

So please bear with me. There are a few comments I would like to reply to, but am unable. Thank you for your responses, anyway - I can read 'em even if I can't reply. I will be back on days before long, and what I laughingly call 'normal' service will be resumed.

Thank you for your patience. Your call is important to us ...

Back!

After throwing a hissy fit for Thursday and Friday, Blogger seems to have returned to the land of the living. I didn't post anything during the relevant time, but I know some comments got swallowed up. It seems as though all recent comments have been removed, but will be back shortly. From Blogger:

Update (5/14 5:37 PM PST): We're making progress restoring comments, some blogs with a lot of content are taking a little more time. Thanks for bearing with us.

Update (5/13 7:46PM PST): Nearly all posts since Wednesday are restored, now bringing back comments from last couple days. We expect the comments to be back this weekend or sooner.

What a frustrating day. We’re very sorry that you’ve been unable to publish to Blogger for the past 20.5 hours. We’re nearly back to normal — you can publish again, and in the coming hours posts and comments that were temporarily removed should be restored. Thank you for your patience while we fix this situation. We use Blogger for our own blogs, so we’ve also felt your pain.

Sorry, folks, but bear with me. I've been away for the weekend on a rally, so apart from being a bit puzzled as to why comments weren't appearing I didn't 'feel the pain' at all. I see a lot of comments have been removed, but I hope they will all be restored soon. Thank you for your patience.

Normal service ...

... will be resumed, possibly. It seems as though Blogger's comments system is on the blink. I've replied to comments made overnight and seen my replies on the main blog page, and then some of them have subsequently disappeared, along with some of the original comments. I know they are there, because Blogger sent me copies to my email.

Easiest just to wait for it to settle down, I guess.

Apols.

UPDATE: it seems that the problem is widespread: see here.

If there is no reolution within 24 hours, I will post the comments myself* - I have them all in email.

*If I can, obviously. It's affecting my own comments as well as others'.

UPDATE 2: Looks as if it has been sorted now. I've heard of the same thing happening on many different blogs today, so we aren't being discriminated against! Thanks for your patience.

Has been resumed ...

... for the time being.

I kept checking, and the pictures came back in ones and twos, and finally the heading banner, which needed to be re-uploaded from my hard drive. When I tried to do this before, all I got was 'URL is not available', which is rubbish as the bloody thing was staring me in the face.

It's a mystery, innit.

Thanks to Derf for monitoring the situation.

Normal Service ...

May, just possibly, be resumed in due course.

For some reason, all my images, including the blog header of me on an earlier XT, have vanished from this blog. The only reason I can find, having done a Google search, is that the unknown server which hosts the images has exceeded its bandwidth for the month (it is the 29th, after all). I will wait until the beginning of next month before I start worrying.

If anyone has any alternative reasons why this might be happening, please let me know in the comments. Also, if you can see the images and header bar OK, let me know too.

Thanks.