Comment Error
Do you know what is starting to annoy me? … Alright, alright; you’re getting to know me too well. I’ll correct that. … Do you know what is one of the very great many things that is starting to annoy me?
Has this ever happened to you? You go to one of your favorite blogs. The blogger says something that inspires you to post a comment. You go to the comment form. You spend some time crafting your words. You hit the “submit” button. The blog then responds with something to the effect of:
I’m really and truly incredibly sorry, but there’s been some sort of silly old system error and this software is far too outrageously incompetent to actually record your insignificant little comment on the first attempt. Please try again.
Obviously, I’m paraphrasing.
Fortunately, the blog leaves your comment on the comment form, so all you have to do is hit the submit button again and it works the second time. But I still find it aggravating.
This is happening much too often for it to actually be a system error. Even Microsoft doesn’t write software that’s that buggy. I assume it’s being done to fight comment spam.
I don’t comment on blogs all that often, so it wouldn’t bother me too much, but some blogs that I really like and really want to comment on use this ploy.
If it was only the blogs that I wasn’t interested that used this technique, then what the hell would I care? I wouldn’t even know they were doing it. As far as I’m concerned, they can implement a comment submission process that requires a lifetime to submit a single comment. It won’t affect me.
Worse, at some blogs, after you hit the submit button a second time, it comes back and says something to the effect of:
Now that you’ve proved to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are either a human or a piece of software who/that is smart enough to click the submit button twice, do you see that barely readable word that I’ve displayed here? Well if you key it in and hit the submit button yet again, I might””only might, mind you””deem you to be someone worthy enough to submit a comment to my precious blog.
Again, I’m obviously paraphrasing.
I don’t comment on blogs all that often, so it wouldn’t bother me too much, but some blogs that I really, really like and really, really want to comment on use this doubly annoying ploy.
Whoa! Amplified d�jà vu. That was weird.
It’s not that I like spammers. Not at all. They are terrible nuisances and if they can be dealt with appropriately, that would be great.
To make sure that my previous statement is not misunderstood, I have to say that I’m a non-violent person and I don’t believe that violence is an appropriate way to rectify problems like spammers. That having been said, if an especially large meteor should, by total coincidence and without any direction from me, happen to land smack-dab on the bridge of a spammer’s nose, I wouldn’t cry as much as I might if it happened to someone else.
I just don’t like having my time wasted.
In fairness, I must add that I’d be hypocritical to condemn all spam-fighting measures because I’ve implemented some on this blog. I’m not going to discuss what they are because I don’t want spammers to spend time trying (probably successfully) to find ways to circumvent them. Heaven forbid I should waste any of their precious time.
One thing I will tell you because you might find it annoying if you don’t know about it is, if I haven’t yet told WordPress that you are someone who can be trusted, or if you put something in your comment that makes WordPress think that I might have been foolish to tell it that, then your comment might sit in the moderation queue before it displays on my blog. But I’m usually pretty good at going through the moderation queue quickly.
And, true, my behind-the-scenes comment spam filtering will, maybe one time in a hundred, register a false positive and classify your comment as spam when it isn’t. If that happens, I apologize. No offense was intended whatsoever. But, the good news is that, for those 99 times out of 100 when it accepts your comment as a perfectly legitimate pearl of wisdom, you can submit it with a single click of a button.
So, if you have a blog that I visit, I certainly understand why you want to try to block spammers, but please do it in a way that doesn’t hold me up. I’m a busy guy. I have naps to take and nostrils to pick. If I spend too much time trying to comment on your blog I might not be able to get to those important duties. That would be a shame.
Categorised as: Internet
“… I have naps to take and nostrils to pick… ” OMG! I never realized we had so much in common. My blogs are wordpress self hosted. I use one plug-in that keeps the spammers away. So I don’t really have to worry about the spam losers. I know. I always make sure that the damn submit button works for comments. So, how did the fire drill go in Shalampax?
Carl: “I never realized we had so much in common.” Yeah, I’ll bet there are a lot more of us than anyone is willing to admit.
The fire drill in Shalampax? There was a fire drill in fire in Shalampax? I helped them set up and promote their blog, but those guys and gals never tell me anything. You’ve never worked with a weirder group of people than Shalampaxians. So, how did the fire drill go? I’m sorry, I don’t know. You’ll have to ask them.
I’m too lazy to leave a comment. I just woke up from my 3rd nap. I took the first two anapso
before 2nd breakfast.
ReformingGeek (x2): Re your first comment: You sound like my kind of women. Not that I’m suggesting anything .. unless it would work.
Re your second comment: Remember I said that If I hadn’t yet told WordPress that you’re a person who can be trusted then your comment might go into the moderation queue before being displayed? Well, it now knows you are to be trusted. It shouldn’t happen again.
OK. So I have no clue what happened to my first lazy comment. I’ll try to type again and it h
and it happened again. I get to the end of the line and it doesn’t wrap. I’m using Fire
fox or is this a joke. You really don’t want my comment, do you?
I’m an offender, I know it. It’s just. without the words, I’m afraid I’ll have gangs of spammers again like I once had.
You’ll notice I just assumed that one of the blogs you’re DYING to comment on is mine.
Stephanie Barr: Good assumption.
I hate it when this happens too…
In fact, sometimes it’s “lost” my comment the 2nd time around,
leaving me to type it all over again.
Because of that, I tend to “CTRL-C” (copy) my comments so I can
easily paste them back later on if the stupid evil cybermonkeys lose everything.
Janna: Yeah, and sometimes I’ve probably surfed away before I noticed that it didn’t take it the first time.
feefifoto: Yeah, I hate both of those things. If I have to be registered on Blogger, I don’t leave a comment.
Mr. New Dilemma: I hadn’t looked at the form for a while. Then ReformingGeek complained about it not wrapping in her browser. So I took a look. It’s screwed up in the template and I can’t find where it is. That’s embarrassing on a post where I’m complaining about problems with commenting. Sorry about that. I’m trying to track down the problem, but so far without success.
All: OK. I think I got the comment box fixed. Sorry about that. Please let me know if you’re still having any problems. I have to go to sleep now before my head crashes into my computer.
Just as bad: when the attempt to submit a comment deletes the comment so it must be recreated, and of course it never sound quite as brilliant the second time you have compose it. Also, those blogs that do not allow anonymous comments, so if you’re not on their system cough::Blogger::cough, you can’t comment.
Your comment box is messed up in my browser. The words dissapear behind the border.
Kinda funny.
I checked to see if the comment box was fixed because, yeah, mine had been wrapping around before which was incredibly irksome. But I hadn’t complained because I’m the stoic suffering-in-silence type.
Sorry, bud, it’s not fixed. Not complaining, just FYI.
Does this mean we’re even?
Stephanie Barr: Please don’t be the stoic suffering-in-silence type. I had no idea there was a problem. I usually respond to comments using the admin panel, not the comment form on the blog. So, I don’t know when the problem crept in, but I didn’t know about it until someone mentioned it.
I’m typing this on the blog’s comment form and it’s working fine now in my browser (Safari on a Mac), whereas it wasn’t before I fixed it. What’s it doing?
You might have to clear your cache to see the fix. I put the fix in the stylesheet, which comes in as a separate file from the page content. The old stylesheet may still be in your cache. I didn’t have to clear the cache for the problem to fix on my computer, but that might be a difference in our browsers.
If that’s not it … please picture me throwing my ripping my hair out.
You’re talking about my blog, aren’t you? I just knew it. If you want to leave a comment, contact me at my e-mail and I’ll berate you from there, if you like.
No, wait, really….
Unfinished Rambler: I’ve lately come to realize the folly in either confirming or denying that any specific blog was one of the ones I was referring to in my post so, unlike my normal nature. I’ll keep my mouth shut about that from this point forward.
As to e-mailing you to be berated. Thanks for the offer. I truly appreciate it. Unfortunately, my time is already filled with being berated by people who do so without my requesting it. However, if a slot opens up the time I have available to be berated (pretty much all day), you’ll be the first person I contact. Thanks. It’s nice to know that I’ve got someone to fall back on if one of my regular rebukers cancels on me.
RedRaider: The commenters of the world thank you. Although, as I said to Unfinished Rambler, that should not be taken as a confirmation or denial that I was referring to your blog.
I ended up removing the word verification thing and any other annoying thing I could think of. I tried to make it as simple and straightforward to comment as possible.
All of this after several readers said that commenting was a pain in the ass. I agree!
OK, it appears to be fixed. I’m going to make sure my comment is long enough to go to the end. Yay! It worked. I’d had the problem with both IE and Firefox.
I’m glad it’s solved and hope you didn’t lose any hair.
I’m going to try the comment thing without the capcha until such time as the spammers catch on to it.
Stephanie Barr: I’m glad to hear it’s working for you now. It probably won’t come as a huge surprise to you to learn that I worry inordinately about that sort of stuff. (Enough such that when I went to the gym today I had to hop on one of the computers that the gym provides for members. You see, the gym’s computers use Windows and Internet Explorer. I felt the overwhelming need to see if my comment box worked on that combination. (It did.) I’ve got a Mac and Safari, which was all I had checked it out on up to that point.)
Re doing without capcha: I know you’re on Blogger, but I’ve never used it myself. Doesn’t Blogger have any plugins that will help you filter out spammers in the background without annoying your legitimate commenters? WordPress has a few. I’ve got one in place. It filters out several spams every day and puts them in a spam queue that I look at once every few days. I’ve only ever seen one false positive — the “one in a hundred” false positive estimate I put in my blog post was probably an overestimate. I’ve also got a few other anti-spam measures that I don’t want to make public because they are much more rudimentary and I don’t want spammers figuring out how to circumvent them.
Also, as you discovered, I’ve got it set so that, under certain conditions, WordPress puts comments into a moderation queue rather than displaying them immediately. I deal with that queue pretty much as comments go in there. (I get an email when they do.) Again, I’m not prepared to reveal the conditions that get a comment sent to the moderation queue, but this time there are two reasons for not disclosing them. One is the same reason why I don’t want to disclose my anti-spam measures: they can probably be circumvented if you know what they are. The second is, much to my surprise, I don’t know what all of the conditions are. I could have sworn that those couple comments of yours from yesterday or the day before, I don’t remember which, should not have gone into the moderation queue, but they did. Go figure.
Thank you for the good belly laugh, I enjoyed it tremendously!!!
I’ve had the same thing happen but it wipes out the comment like I wasn’t even there – it’s impossible to come up with a second mind blowing comment so I leave.
Mamaflo: I’m glad you enjoyed it. I seem to have touched a nerve in a few people here. I can never predict when I’m going to do that.
This annoys me so much too!
Why make it harder for the commenter to comment.
We love comments. We want comments. We MUST have comments. Let’s not irk those who can feed are narrcissistic needs.
Amen!
quirkyloon: Absolutely right! … And thanks for helping to fulfill my narcissistic needs!
Ooooh. Your comment box is beautiful now. Good Job!
Mr. New Dilemma: Thanks. I had a couple of sleepless hours trying to fix that. I don’t know when the bug crept in. The template file that I thought was generating the comment box wasn’t. (I know because I tried putting the word “test” in some of the text to see if I had the right file. I didn’t.) I couldn’t find the template file that was generating it, and I still can’t. I made a change to my blog’s style sheet to fix it. Unfortunately. That screwed up some other stuff that I’ve been fixing as I find it. Isn’t technology grand?
Gosh, and here I was thinking I was the only finicky one out there annoyed by this. It happens to me on my own blog when I reply to comments….jeeeez!
MadMadMargo: No, as you can see from my post and a number of commenters here, you aren’t the only annoyed by it.
Regarding it happening to you on your own blog when you reply to comments: A way around that is to reply through the administrator’s panel rather than through your blog. Of course, the downside of that strategy is, as I just had the misfortune to learn, you might not find out about a bug in your own comment form until someone mentions it in a comment on a post where you complain about the annoyances of commenting on other people’s blogs. That was embarrassing.
I comment frequently on a site that belongs to someone close to me. The act of having to repeat the comment process has happened to me on occasion too. When I asked the blogger about it, he had no idea why it was happening. Not everyone is doing it on purpose. At the same time, I get just as annoyed as you do.
Mother Goose: Yeah, that can be annoying. And, no, it’s not always on purpose. Sometimes the software I use (WordPress) does things that I’m not expecting at all.
It’s also possible you’re going into a moderation queue and the bloggers aren’t very quick about reviewing comments held for review. I usually get to comments held for moderation quickly (yours was approved in about 3 minutes
). However, despite my jokes to the contrary, I do have a bit of a life, so I’m not always sitting at my computer when an email comes in saying there’s a comment awaiting moderation.
People who comment here regularly usually don’t have their comments go into the moderation queue at all unless they write a comment that WordPress and the plugins I use think, for some reason, I might want to moderate.
I hate getting my futile attempts rejected, trying to read those stupid captcha things …
What I hate more is when I am replying to comments, a few at a time (so it takes me awhile) and I accidently delete them before I send it (stupid laptop keyboard goes screwy sometimes).
Or when a resident cat decides to walk across my keyboard whist trying to respond to comments (hmmm… I guess I know why my keyboard sucks now).
Maureen: I’m not a pet person. My keyboard often gets into bad shape, not because of cats, but because I eat at my computer and I’m a sloppy eater.
Word verification? Hey those are not words. And if you get it right (not guaranteed), then the message appears: “Your message may appear if I decide that it’s okay.” (paraphrase). What’s with that? (non)word verification and then approval . . . I don’t get it.
Secondary Roads: You’re absolutely right. I misspoke when I paraphrased it as asking you to type in a verification “word”. Rather than “word verification,” it would be more appropriate to refer to it as “gobbledygook” verification.
And yeah, there is an annoying amount of spam that comes through here and is filtered out before anyone gets to see it but, as I said, that all happens in a way that does not add a burden to the commenter. If I put commenters through all of the work that some blogs put them through then I wouldn’t be so rude as to then force some comments into a moderation queue (as I do) before displaying them.