Month: December 2013

I’ve been reading the stream here and have become aware that it is impossible to edit comments here. It is, further, not possible for the blogger to delete comments here, and — in my opinion based on experience– that is a very bad design flaw.

Over on WordPress.com, I have been hit with spambot comments pretty hard. The ability to delete comments that consist of little more than boilerplate designed to get the commenter’s link on your blog is priceless. These blogs are running pretty quiet right now because they’re so new the factory wax is still on the system, but mark my words– as soon as these blogs get some time on them they WILL get found by the spammers, and in that day you can bet that the ability to delete spam comments will be a godsend you can’t do without. So— how soon until we get effective spam-fighting tools?

 

Editing one’s own comment is another thing that should have been from the first. Everybody suffers from hoof-in-mouth disease once in awhile, the ability to go back and effectively take back what you wrote can be worth its weight in gold. It’s worth considering adding this to our blogs as soon as that can happen.

Just a thought, maybe the powers-that-be here might want to consider these things.

OK, not much of a title– but for a blog that barely exists– give me a break, eh?

As it is, I daresay that if I wanted a completely secret method of communicating something to someone else, a blog is hard to beat. I can fit all of the readers of my main effort into the bathroom– it’s a small bathroom– and have plenty of room left over. So, if ever I slip a cog and decide to develop a terrorist plot with my fiends, a blog is the perfect medium for communication with my evil henchmen. Nobody will ever know!

At this moment, it’s no joke that the only comments I’ve had on my main effort– this blog isn’t it– have been from bots looking for link-backs to blogs that exist to sell jackets and Blue-Ray devices. Jackets, mostly. A bot comment generally consists of an outrageous level of praise for my rather modest efforts at blogging, one even reaching to the point of suggesting that I was the answer to his prayer. In my opening post there, no less. Problem: Besides the outrageous level of praise, every comment linked back to a foreign-language– usually French, but also German and Chinese– blogs that were selling something. An actual, honest-to-God comment from a real person who maybe has his own real blog seems about as rare as hen’s teeth– but they DO exist, I’ve seen them on other people’s blogs.

So– it looks like a bit of a contest between this blog and my WordPress.com blog, as to which one will develop “legs”. I know the only way to develop a readership is to keep writing, but it has to be said that when your only replies come from spambots it takes the wind out of your sails to keep writing.

So– steady as she goes, warp factor one.