Following up on yesterday’s post, I’m trying out Blogger’s new OpenID comment option, which should allow you to comment (hopefully with backlinks) even if you don’t have a Blogger/Google account. I don’t know if this is the best option, or even if it will work for everybody, but I thought I’d give it a go. It’s only thanks to the comments at Thud’s earlier post that I even know this option exists in BloggerDraft. (Which I also didn’t know about.)
Let me know what you think, assuming you’re able, in the comments below.
Testing
This is a test
OK, so it links to my thudfactor.wordpress.com account (since that’s the OpenID I used) but since I host my own WordPress installation it doesn’t point to that, and I don’t have a choice of what to do.
In addition to trying to decipher a Captcha, which I find very difficult sometimes, I also have to “choose an identity,” type in the domain name my OpenID belongs to, then go to another screen to type in my password. As usability goes, it blows, and the end result isn’t what we’re looking for.
For someone who’s used to filling out one form — often one that remembers who I am from post to post — this is irritating. The credentialing process will often take longer than it does to write the comment.
The trick here is to make spam comments more difficult to place without throwing barriers in front of people who want to comment, and Blogger’s doing an awfully poor job of it, even with this solution. Sorry, Fred.
See, I posted the test comment above and then I wrote this one… now I have to re-authenticate… I think I’d even prefer per-blog registration to this.
Correction, the re-authentication only required half the steps, I didn’t get a password challenge the second time. Still a pain.
I received the following error..
“Incorrect OpenID url”
The URL I entered was “http://www.wormbrain.com/”
Eventually had to sign in with my blogger/google ID to comment. Not sure what I did wrong.
Yeah, as near as I can tell, OpenID seems to be a relatively new (and, to my mind, a little confusing) concept.
You got that because wormbrain.com isn’t an OpenID-supported website. WordPress, which you use to run the blog, is. Therefore, you’d have to log in, then authenticate the comment. You should be able to select “yes always” so you don’t have to go through the full re-authentication every time. But I can’t guarantee that.
In the pull-down menu below, Blogger suggest some OpenID sites like Livejournal, TypeKey, and WordPrsss, and there’s what I think is a full list here:
http://openid.net/where/
Unless I have it completely wrong.
Basically, it exists (in theory) to prevent anonymous commenting and other people pretending to be you. While in ideal conditions it might actually do that, I think in reality it doesn’t work as well, and the trade-off is annoyance and inconvenience.
(And keep in mind, I think the grumbling over the captchas is a little silly. Them, I find a very minor inconvenience, if that.)
There’s a lot of commenting going on at the BloggerInDraft weblog, some of which addresses the concerns that I’ve been seeing here and at Thud’s site. I think “MS” sums up what are quickly becoming my own feelings on this:
If you are going to force someone to have an ID, then open ID is good, but I think no one should be forced to make their users log in, and I think that those who don’t log in should be able to put a URL in a URL field marked “(optional)”.
So, my apologies to commenters who are having trouble as I work out some of the kinks that Blogger has recently added to the system.
And man — could these comment boxes be any smaller? That alone might be reason for me to look elsewhere.
By “comment boxes,” I mean the box in which you leave a comment, not the comment window that pops up attached to an individual post. Seriously, why can’t the leave-your-comment box expand when you maximize the window?