Mon 13 Jun 2011
FSA – Disable to Help the Disabled
Posted by KC under Feline Service Announcement
[24] Comments - Add Yours Here
Click here to go to the Monday Noos Post 6/13/2001
A FELINE SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT
Will you disable to help the disabled?
You may not know that there are a number of active bloggers who live with some form of disability. For example, Carly – the human owned by TIA suffers from blindness, making blog visiting and commenting often difficult. Our own ML — who is managed by KC and the Sherwood Bunch — has 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 many others) commenting can be difficult — especially if we must also complete “word verficiation”, 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 had against spam.
Now, all Blogspot offers automatic spam control. We’re not sure about how WordPress and other blog templates work… but all in all, it will be a really big help to many of us if you can “disable to help the disabled”.
Many of us would love to comment more often, but are either slowed down, hindered or stopped by these added controls.
So… please take a look at the settings on your blog, update them if you are comfortable doing so … it will help! Thanks!
The Zoolatry Girls
Maggy and Zoey and Ann
Don't furget to scroll down to see ALL the posts fur the day - the last one for the day has the autolinkies!
Cat blogger and related blog posts for the day are welcome in the autolinkies!
We's all about cats, and ours woofie and critter furriends here, but blog posts that are not at least 3/4 related to cats, dogs or critters or on such a blog will be removed wifout notice.
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Click the pikshur or here to ree-purrt noos!
June 13th, 2011 at 2:59 am
Good idea. I’ll do it.
June 13th, 2011 at 3:31 am
this had never even occurred to me, sadly…. thanks a lot for the service announcement. i hope that many people act on it.
June 13th, 2011 at 3:39 am
Happy Mewn-day everybody! We hope everyone had a super good weekends. This Bloggerin is fun! We made us nuther post today =^.^=
We hope everyone bees happy (???)
Kwee Cats
June 13th, 2011 at 3:43 am
Oh noes!!! We puts ours in the wronged spot!!!!!
We are sorry everybody. Please excuse and forgive us.
June 13th, 2011 at 3:46 am
Mom Kim: I took the word verification off a while ago on the Fuzzy Tales blog. I get some spam, but am not inundated with it, at least not at this point. I think I inadvertently (but happily) managed to set things so that all the “anonymous” comments automatically are deleted. LOL.
In any case, I had taken ours off because it adds a wee bit of extra time to commenting. And following 400 or so blogs is hard enough to keep up with.
Good points re: accessibility, though.
BTW, there are a couple of blogs (Kiril’s, I think, and Baby Patches come to mind) that have very awkward/difficult word verifications, which is why I seldom leave a comment on them.
The other form of commenting is with Disqus, which I personally dislike — and also is why I seldom leave comments on the blogs that use it.
June 13th, 2011 at 3:57 am
I fully support this initiative. WordPress users have Akismet which I believe is standard with WordPress now, but there really is no need at all for any other spam prevention on wordpress if you have Akismet.
Thanks for starting this, as it will definately encourage more comments!
June 13th, 2011 at 4:48 am
I totally agree and support the move. Not that I am disabled in any way, but I do empathize and welcome any moves that make commenting less troublesome and time consuming.
June 13th, 2011 at 7:28 am
I think that this is a wonderful idea. I run into problems with word verification all the time.
June 13th, 2011 at 8:13 am
This is a wonderful idea. I remember there being a lot of blogs where I couldn’t read the words that you needed to type in order to leave a comment, and I, too, would become frustrated. I recently even left my comment open to anonymous because I wanted people to read the lovely comments that many of you have left for me and Angel Praline since she crossed over the Bridge.
I’m still around an visiting some blogs and still appreciate comments from my friends out there. Look for a BIG announcement in about 4 weeks.
Mom Paula
June 13th, 2011 at 9:24 am
Thanks for letting us know. We are on our way to disable.
June 13th, 2011 at 10:54 am
We shut off our word verification when Tia’s mom Carly mentioned it – and she has been able to comment at our site now. If you are concerned still you can always use comment verification – it does help. We do keep it set to registered users but so you know you don’t have to type your blog link that is optional (but you do need name and email if you aren’t registered).
June 13th, 2011 at 11:07 am
We have never used word verification and have not had any incidents. We do get occasional anon comments (spammers) but we just manually delete those ifvthey get through.
Purrs
Abby
June 13th, 2011 at 1:28 pm
Thanks for the Feline Service Announcement, I disabled my word verification.
June 13th, 2011 at 1:55 pm
We’ve never used word verification. With Blogspot you can set things so after a few months (however long you want) comments automatically become Moderated. (you might even be able to set a time to close comments entirely, we don’t know and are too lazy to check
) That, combined with setting things so you automatically get a copy of any comment posted, should keep spammers pretty much under control.
We suspect most other blogging platforms offer similar options.
PS: We have Typepad and OpenID identities as well as our Blogspot ‘home’. You can (usually) link them back to your Blogspot blog. FWIW.
June 13th, 2011 at 2:02 pm
Mommy went in and disabled our word verification stuff. Let us know if anyone has problems with our blog.
Thanks,
3 Kats and a Kwilter
June 13th, 2011 at 2:46 pm
We agree with all of this, including what Fuzzy Tales said about the hated Disqus, which we can’t figure out to leave a comment, and at least one other horrible word verification which is almost impossible to read.
June 13th, 2011 at 3:38 pm
Done! We luckily haven’t had any spam on this blog, but did on our old blog.
June 13th, 2011 at 5:53 pm
We have never used word verification and spam is not too bad
We think this idea is very good as we tend not to think about how blogging affects the disabled.Let us know if there are other ways we can help.
Purrs Tillie and Georgia
June 13th, 2011 at 9:53 pm
Folks, I have not had word verification on my blog for a long time now. I hate it and sometimes can’t be bothered to comment on blogs that use it. I almost never get spam comments posted to the blog – they all get caught in the spam filter that Blogger offers. I totally support this initiative!
June 13th, 2011 at 10:19 pm
We disabled our word verification awhile ago and added comment moderation on posts older than 3 days. We rarely get any spam.
It’s a great idea and anything that makes it easier and faster to comment is very welcome!
June 13th, 2011 at 10:58 pm
Lilly Lu has to have dental work tomorrow and her Mom is scared that she will have the same problem that Maxie had last year. Also their Blurp M is having surgery tomorrow. They need lots and lots of purrs from all of us!
http://lillyandiristellall.blogspot.com
June 14th, 2011 at 8:59 pm
fanks you so much fur the prayers for mommy. sh’s hurting.
June 15th, 2011 at 12:31 pm
Hey, Fuzzy Wuzzy, we disabled the word verify! ;-D
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, Daddy Kiril, & I, are willing to check “Or Not” so as to remove this step, from Meowsings, and his own blog (http://www.madmacedonian.com), 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, unless we see that removing it doesn’t cause the Spambots to flock to us like Cats flock to a stash of Catnip. ;-D
With 9 years experience blogging on 4 blogs, Daddy & I, learned years ago, of the scourge that are the spammers, and even as technology improved in the battle, we just felt comfy with the extra steps because it cut down drastically on the number of spam comments we have to deal with on a daily basis.
In our spam filter, of comments caught by Typepad, there are thousands of spam that never reached the stage of our needing to see them, going back several years, it’s just that Typepad has yet to develope a way for us to empty that stash for all time. ;-D
Go figure. ;-D
June 19th, 2011 at 8:12 pm
I just wanted to say what a wonderful initiative this is. The Cat Blogosphere does it again!
Thanks CB!