Thursday, February 16
Blogger has changed the word verification feature. The problem … these ‘supposed’ words can be far more difficult to decipher. (Usually worse than the ones in the screenshot to the right.)
I’ve turned off the feature on this blog and will monitor what happens with the spam comments. If I start getting a whole bunch of them, I may revert to comment moderation in lieu of the word verification.
In the meantime, I’ve read a few comments on other blogs where some have noted that they aren’t sure how to remove word verification. Here are the ‘how to’ steps — if you are using Blogger’s new interface, you will have to temporarily revert to the old interface first.
- Open your blog in your dashboard; I do it by clicking Design as shown below
- On the far right of the dashboard, click the gear icon; select Old Blogger Interface
Once you see the old Blogger dashboard:
- Click the Settings link
- From the second row of tabs, click the Comments link
- Scroll down and find Show Word Verification for Comments? and select the No radio button
- Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the Save Settings button
That’s all there is to it.
And if you want to revert back to the new interface, you can easily do so by clicking the ‘Try the Updated Blogger Interface’ link at the top of the Old Blogger dashboard.
Thanks for the heads up. I've noticed more and more offbeat letters in word verification. I kept mine to moderate but turned word verification off.
ReplyDeleteThanks Erin, you're such a good teacher.
ReplyDeleteWe've turn off this new feature on our blog. We love comments, no matter how "spammy" they might be.
Actually, previously, with no comment moderation on our blog until Blogger updated this feature, in over 3500 comments, we've only seen two Spam comments.
Keep up the good work!
Thank you Erin. These new word verification's are making me crazy. I'm not a robot but I can't make out most of the words and will just give up if the first time doesn't work.
ReplyDeleteThanks. I have just about made up my mind to stop trying to comment on blogs with it, it just takes way to much time and frustration.
ReplyDeleteI have always just just used the moderation feature and have had no problems.
that is a great tutorial, Erin, so clear. I hope everyone reads it. I haven't had word verification on my blog for more than a year now and have yet to get a spam comment through the spam blocker.
ReplyDeleteGreat post Erin. I have read several bloggers tonight who say they will no longer comment if they have to slog through these crazy verification words. I haven't used it for a long time, or moderation either, and have not had a problem.
ReplyDeleteGood for you and thanks for the tutorial. Hopefully everyone will get rid of that annoying comment moderation. I have never used it and I don't have problems with spam, except a few anonymous comments on older posts...and blogger always catches them first.
ReplyDeleteIn defense of those horrible, unreadable words (Not to suggest anyone should keep word verification "ON"...) reCAPTCHA does serve a valuable service.
ReplyDeleteThe process asks a Human Being to decipher a word from a difficult-to-read document that OCR fails to interpret. I often go in search of books and articles that are no longer in print. (Either really old or really, really obscure)
Finding what I wish to read digitized and for free at Google Books or Gutenberg.org is a huge treat.
It's a P.I.T.A for sure, but consider that you're performing a great public service. We who read weird old stuff thank you ;))
From Wiki:
"reCAPTCHA supplies subscribing websites with images of words that optical character recognition (OCR) software has been unable to read. The subscribing websites (whose purposes are generally unrelated to the book digitization project) present these images for humans to decipher as CAPTCHA words, as part of their normal validation procedures. They then return the results to the reCAPTCHA service, which sends the results to the digitization projects.