Hey…this message is to Grumpy Rumblings of the Half-Tenured:
Thanks for the link love!
And I hope you have a very happy holiday season!
♥♥♥
The comments section there will not let me sign in. Like many a site, its comments function demands that I be logged into a specific G-mail account. I am logged into that account, and it still won’t let me leave a comment.
Have you noticed that it’s becoming more and more difficult to comment at many sites? And have you noticed the number of sites that force you to post your comments to Facebook? I’ve pretty well given up commenting, except at a few select sites that make commenting reasonably easy, do not require sign-in to Facebook (or any other off-target site), and that allow me to identify myself as Funny.
I don’t want to broadcast comments to every random blog post on Facebook. My site there is as unpublic as it’s possible to make it (actually, I believe my site there is about to go away altogether, because I like FB less and less with every new annoyance it perpetrates). The only people who see it are choir members and a very few personal friends who are NOT INTERESTED in blogging and certainly not interested in my maunderings at other people’s and organizations’ websites.
Nor do I appreciate the demand that every reader sign up for a G-mail account. Not everybody on earth needs or wants a G-mail account. I happen to have several, not because I’m madly enthusiastic about G-mail but because I’ve had to use G-mail in my work. You should not be required to sign up with a commercial entity to exercise your freedom of speech — no matter what the forum!
I have a G-mail account that I use when asked to provide an address to an entity a) that appears likely to send me unsolicited and unwanted messages or b) asks me for an e-mail address when I do not care to share my e-mail address. I often use it when a demand that I sign into a G-mail account pops up, and I also shunt hundreds of nuisance messages from the junior college district into it. And my suspicions to the effect that giving certain entities an e-mail address brings a flood of irrelevant junk messages into your private in-box are confirmed: since the last time I cleaned out that account, 264 more messages have accrued — fifty pages of them — none of which I care to read.
Disqus is egregious this way. It’s almost as bad as the junior college, to whose mailing list unhappy “members” frequently reply with “Unsubscribe” messages sent to everyone on the list. News sites that force you to “sign up” to leave a comment also blitz you with junk mail.
And while we’re on the subject of Google, Blogger sites are especially prone to functioning like tools of that outfit. I really resent it when I come across a site will not let me post a comment unless I have a Blogger site of my own. If Blogger is to be a closed club, dear Google, then make the sites hosted on Blogger visible only to viewers who have Blogger sites.
Google and Facebook are truly disturbing, taken together. The two companies have become the Big Brother of our Brave New World. An awful lot of stuff that is no one’s business gets absorbed by those two Borgs, without users’ full understanding of the implications. Pretty much the only way to protect your privacy from such outfits and to prevent them from broadcasting your every maundering to the entire universe is to remain silent.
IMHO, print communication and old-fashioned snail mail had some big advantages over the present system, not the least of which might be described as manageable freedom of speech. Forcing you to publish speech where you don’t want it published effectively quashes your freedom of speech, because its effect is to make you stop speaking.
You and me both on this one, Funny. Captcha, email confirmations on following comments, Livefyre… all a huge PITA.
The newer Captchas are extremely annoying, because they’re illegible. Often you have to go through two or three of them to find a combination of characters that you can read.
A few months ago WordPress made some changes that impacted people with WordPress accounts who were trying to leave comments on other WordPress blogs. I’ve had the requirement to leave a name and email address to comment on my blog turned off since that time and I haven’t had any problems pop up. The WordPress spam filter catches most spam comments and I just periodically clean them out. My blog is not monetized nor do I plan to do so and it doesn’t get many readers/commenters. I suspect the ones that require one to jump through hoops to comment are set up that way to track activity/traffic because they are generating some sort of revenue. My pet peeve with blogs is visiting a new one (perhaps from a Links post) and having to click through the annoying “sign up for my newsletter” message. Ugh!
@ Linda: Akismet is the best of the several spam filters I’ve tried — they all leave something to be desired. Right now it refuses to delete old spam. Noticed this at a point when 2500 old spam messages had piled up, and I couldn’t get rid of them.
Yes, increased traffic on your blog can increase the amount you can get for advertising. What most sites earn, however, is not enough to make it worth annoying readers.
Sometimes I reconsider monetization for FaM. It’s always just on the borderline: it earns enough that one hesitates to turn up one’s nose at it, but it still isn’t very much, especially in terms of the amount of work one puts into a website. If, however, as with Funny, your site is more like a hobby than a job, then even a few dollars feels like free money.
On the other hand, some extremely annoying things do come up in connection with AdSense. When, in the moments after the Connecticut shootings, I editorialized about the need to stop sales & trade in semiautomatic weapons, what should pop up in the left-hand sidebar but a big, splashy display ad for…yes! automatic rifles!
And yeah, I know: you can get into AdSense and block certain advertisers. But that’s time-consuming, and I do have better things to do with my time than to figure out who these people are and how to make them quit taking up space on my website. The obvious way to accomplish that is simply to ditch AdSense.
Here’s a puzzle – I don’t blog and I seldom comment on those I enjoy reading (yours and about 4 others). I would like to read “Surviving and Thriving” but cannot access it directly, but can access it from your link. Is this strange?
@ Ellen2: That is strange. Donna said she was having some server problems. Maybe it has something to do with that???
Bummer. I turned that off before… I will have to check to see if it’s been automatically been turned back on. WordPress does that sometimes. Thanks for the heads up!
And Merry Christmas to you!
Completely with you! I am not registering ANYWHERE just so I can comment nor do I have a non-personal facebook page to use (and since I try to stay anonymous I am not going to link my personal facebook account just to tell someone I agree or disagree with their financial move).
I have enjoyed being able to comment with my twitter account on bigger sites huffington