Welcome to Book Blogging 101, a weekly feature on Parajunkee’s View that answers your questions and strives to share great book blogging tips and some helpful hints to assist you on your book blogging endeavors.
Lately I’ve seen a LOT of people posting about captcha and why and how it should be disabled. After participating in Feature & Follow Friday this past week though, I noticed a significant amount of bloggers still have captcha enabled. I was hoping you could do a post about captcha, and some of the benefits of removing it from your blog? My eyes are starting to burn from all this squinting!
Captcha is enabled as a default. You literally used to have to go to OLD blogger’s interface to turn it off, under the comments section in your settings. Most people don’t know this. (Luckily now Blogger has updated to include it in the New Interface, but this a recent update) Blissful ignorance and then on top of it, when they comment themselves they don’t see it. So, how would they know?
The benefits of Captcha:
- Catch those evil spammers before they comment.
- That’s about it.
The Pitfalls of Using Captcha:
- Potential commentators will get sidetracked as they try to figure out if that is an h or an n. Bye-bye comment.
- Did you know Blogger & WordPress has a Spam filter? Captcha is a redundant filter
- Google seems to be making the captcha text harder and harder to discern
- People will view your blog as “uninformed” and give it an air of unprofessionalism. Most “seasoned” blogs do not have captcha because they know there isn’t a benefit
Most bloggers agree with you, Kelly — get rid of Captcha.
You’ll need to edit your CSS to even begin doing this. You would do this by going into your Template Designer and copying something like this, but of course make it your own:
.post img {
border-radius: 15px;
}
blockquote {
background: #333;
color: #FFF;
padding: 25px;
border-radius: 15px;
margin-left: 55px;
}
I can’t get to all the questions, but please ask your BB101 Questions here…bring it on.
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I used to have captcha enabled on my blog. I don’t have captcha on my blog anymore since it annoys the heck out of me when I have to try and figure out what all those tiny, blurry, smushed letters are on other blogs. Why put someone else through the aggravation I don’t want to go through.
If I have try more then once to try and figure out the letters I tend to just give up.
Great Post!!
This is one of the main reasons behind my switching to WP (not that Blogger really cares since they are a freebie source.)
I did hear a rumor that Blogger is forcing users to go with the new interface soon, so that will cause CAPTCHA to be even more of a problem if you can’t access the old interface to shut it off. (One more way Google is driving me insane in their attempt to control the world.)
I’ve got an etiquette question for you then! Is it appropriate to let the blogger know it’s on? (I would want to know!) and if so, how? Email? Tweet? In the comment?
-Jac @ For Love and Books
I did hear a rumor that Blogger is forcing users to go with the new interface soon, so that will cause CAPTCHA to be even more of a problem if you can’t access the old interface to shut it off. (One more way Google is driving me insane in their attempt to control the world.)
Yup, the old interface is going away soon. But you can turn on/off CAPTCHA in the new interface. From your blog Dashboard > Settings > Posts and Comments > under the Comments section, it shows Show word verification – Select No and save your settings.
Ugh. I was sure I had Captcha turned off (because I HATE the darn thing with a passion) but I’ve just gone to settings and apparently it was on. I’m annoyed now that I’ve been making my readers go through that just to leave a comment. But at least I know now!
Fabulous post. Great tips. Love coming here to get these 101 tips!
In the last few weeks, Google did something and every blogger blog went back to the default captcha settings, too. luckily, a blogger had sent out a tweet about it and I checked mine and turned it off again.
But for others who do have it, it’s annoying. I can’t read what the word is half the time and then when I do get through with jumping all those hoops, I find out that they also have my comment also has to be approved before showing up. So… what is the point of both? If I have to jump through tons of hoops, I won’t leave a comment.
That actually explains a lot, because I feel like there’s just more and more blogs that use captcha, even blogs I know didn’t use to have it.
Thanks for pointing that out! I was not aware of that and will be checking my blogs ASAP. I HATE captcha
As someone who is captcha handicapped..and i mean i get it wrong 90% of the time..i tend to comment more on blogs that do not have it. I disabled mine from the beginning and have never had a problem. Blogger filters spam and it works beautifully.
My advice..lose the captcha!
Weird, I’ve been actually wanting to include captcha on my blog. Spam still gets through my blog and I had deleting spam comments. Then again, I have a self-hosted WordPress blog so the filters aren’t that great. I think I’ll opt for some sort of text captcha instead, like a “one+one=?” kind of thing.
Akismet solves the spam problem beautifully. And it’s free.
I hate captcha, it’s tiresome and difficult to read, I disabled it from my blog.
Thank you for the great and easy explanation of how to format the blockquote.
Captcha makes commenting on my iPhone nearly impossible, I have to scroll up to see the words and once you do that you can no longer type in the little text box, so I then have to click ‘done’ and re-enter the box. Needless to say if I am on my iPhone trying to comment and Captcha comes up, they lose my comment. So annoying!
Thanks for the tip about the rounded corners, I had been trying to figure out how to do that. Your video was super simple and easy to follow for someone who is HTML challenged like myself.
Love your 101 posts
Ha!! Thank you, so many times I’ve wanted to leave a comment but after the third try I just give up.
I can’t stand captcha it takes me two to three tries before I even get it right. I don’t have captcha on my blog and I can honestly say I’ve only had one spam message come through in the past 6 months. The blogger filters work just fine in my opinion without all that extra moderation.
Ah Captcha…. I’m a bit dyslexic so it works for and against me with captcha. I can figure out squiggles and yet they all blend together. *sigh* Help a girl out peeps… disable it.
Amen. I hate Captcha.
I added a little antiCaptcha button at the bottom of my page (made by Missie The Unread Reader) .
SOOOO right about Captcha! I hate it. I get emails when comments are made on my blog. If for some reason it makes it through bloggers filter, I just delete it. I am a better spam filter! Less annoying.
Great post.
Valerie
StuckInBooks.com
Oh my gosh I didn’t even know my captcha was enabled. I HATE them and google is insane with the massive squiggles and overall unreadableness. Also I was wondering how to make the quote box, thank you!
Yey!!
Down with Captcha!
Yay! I’m so glad i can go back to the upgrade and more advance blogger now that captcha is no longer reappearing! Thanks for telling me about this development! You are the best!
Thanks for pointing it out. I had no idea I had captcha on all my blogger blogs. As I’m logged in to them, it never pesters me. I HATE captcha.
And love your coding tips. I didn’t know that blogger had that easy way of adding changes to the CSS. My WP CSS page scares me. Fortunately I don’t need to change my blockquote thanks to you.
For those who can’t find the CAPTCHA setting in Blogger’s new interface, here’s where to find it:
Go to your blog’s Dashboard > Settings > Posts and Comments > under the Comments section, you’ll see Show word verification.
Select No.
Save Settings.
And you’re done.