Four Things I’ve Noticed Lately

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 5, 2010

I love visiting a lot of blogs and leaving comments where I can. Because I’m all over the place, I tend to start noticing some things that maybe others hadn’t noticed. There are 4 things in particular I’m going to mention today.

by Steven Bridger

The first is that I’ve noticed on many blogs this thing at the bottom of the comment area asking me to click the box to prove I’m not a spammer. I thought that was a little odd until it hit me that it’s come about because of a new plugin called the Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin, created by Gail Gardner and Andy Bailey. This is in response to problems they and others have had with Akismet, something I don’t have a problem with but I understand the issue. Many people have said they haven’t had a single bit of spam since adding it; a couple of people said they’re still getting some. Still, it might be a nice addition for some of you to check out.

The second is that I’ve noticed that WordPress.com blogs aren’t sending me email asking me to subscribe to comments anymore. Man, that was greatly irritating to me, as you know if you’ve read this blog, because that’s the reason I was hesitant to leave comments on those blogs, just as I still am with Disqus blogs. I also noticed that I haven’t gotten that message from the last two Intense Debate blogs I wrote a comment on as well. Now, here’s the other side of that. To date, I’ve only gotten two notifications from blogs I’ve left a comment on as it pertains to any of these, and both were WordPress blogs. This tells me that either the owners of the blogs have to go in and select to send notifications to people they respond to or it just doesn’t work for everyone for some reason. I’ve tested this by going back to see if people have responded to a comment of mine, and if they have then I know I never got the notification. I’ll just ask those of you who have WordPress blogs on their site to check out your settings.

The third thing I’ve noticed seems to be happening only to me, unless other Firefox users have seen it but haven’t said anything. This is in relation to the CommentLuv plugin, which I absolutely love. Lately it seems I visit some blogs, write a comment, and the CommentLuv thing doesn’t see my blog. I thought that was wonky and decided to write the folks about it. However, I closed my blog once, popped it back up, went to the same site and put my information in and suddenly it was working again. This tells me the problem is with Firefox and not CommentLuv. I have absolutely no idea what that’s about or how to fix it. I do know that I went through the last update for Firefox and maybe it’s related to that somehow. But I haven’t been able to find on the search engines where anyone else has complained about this.

The fourth thing is that it seems that Twitter Tools isn’t fully working properly. In this case, if I write a post in advance, when it posts Twitter Tools doesn’t show it. It probably took me a couple of weeks to notice this, and it seems to be holding true for all 3 of my blogs. If I post immediately, it goes there, but otherwise, it’s a no-show. This is problematic because I write most of my posts beforehand and schedule them, and if I have to go back and post the link manually it defeats the purpose of having the plugin to begin with. On this one I’ve seen other people complain, but to date there’s been no real fix for the issue, though many think it’s related to the Twitter oAuth thing we all had to do back in August.

That’s all I have. If you’ve noticed anything odd, or wish to comment on any of the above, please share.

Tags: Blogging, commentluv, Firefox, Twitter Tools, wordpress plugins, wordpress.com

32 Comments »

Karen Cruz:

Mitch I am having the same issue as your 3rd one. I use Firefox and I noticed it on your blog first. When I enter in my url it shows no blog post. So I have been using poeticvoices.us url instead. I checked the feed to my site and it shows its working. I did notice however that when I put in passioninwords.com which is an add on domain that is forwarded to the .us url, that registers. I will try through another browser and see if I get the same results.

Mitch Reply:
November 5th, 2010 at 8:35 PM

Give it a shot, Karen; I think it worked for me on Opera, but I don’t really like Opera and only have it to view other websites when I’m doing maintenance on them. It’s irksome, I must admit.

Mitch Reply:
November 5th, 2010 at 9:00 PM

And it seems I was incorrect about Intense Debate, because yours just sent me a message asking me to subscribe to comments, which of course I never do. Oh well…

Karen Cruz Reply:
November 5th, 2010 at 11:22 PM

Hey Mitch so I am commenting using safari and its still not showing my blog post. I put in a support ticket at comluv to see what the find out. As for intense debate I believe I have the subscribe to reply as a default and you have to unselect it. I will look in to it now and change it.

Mitch Reply:
November 5th, 2010 at 11:41 PM

I hope that works; I used to not comment at all on those things.

November 5th, 2010 | 2:59 PM

Susan @ Easy At Home Workouts:

I’m going to try that plug in you mentioned to help with spam. Mine is out of control.

Mitch Reply:
November 5th, 2010 at 8:35 PM

Good luck with it, Susan, and let us know how it works out for you.

November 5th, 2010 | 3:30 PM

Barbara Ling, Virtual Coach:

I’ve also noticed guest posts all over the place. And those ‘ask people 20 questions’ thingees.

I’ll have to dabble in those….

Mitch Reply:
November 5th, 2010 at 8:36 PM

Barb, I’ve seen those as well. I don’t do them all that often, but I notice when I do, at least when I’m answering them, people seem to shy away from commenting on them, as if they’re freaked to be taking a look at how I think. lol

November 5th, 2010 | 4:09 PM

Alex@Jocuri:

Hey Mitch,
Unless you missed it GASP(Growmap Anti Spam Plugin) was launched some time ago, and since then many people are saying they are having great success with it.
About the commentluv problem, I can’t comment on that but when you get this problem you can try to hold SHIFT+reload the page(which will reload the page without using cache) maybe that will fix it..maybe..

Mitch Reply:
November 5th, 2010 at 8:57 PM

Alex, I read about it when it came out, but I didn’t know it was putting in that little check box, which I’ve actually only noticed over the last couple of weeks. As for the other, I’ll have to try that next time; reloading hasn’t worked before, but maybe with the shift thing it will be different.

Mitch Reply:
November 5th, 2010 at 8:59 PM

By the way Alex, what language is your site in anyway? Hate to seem so stupid, but I’m just not sure.

Alex@Jocuri Reply:
November 6th, 2010 at 8:54 AM

Don’t worry about not knowing, but as a tip you can take a piece of content and insert it in translate.google.com leaving the first language “Detect language”.

The language is Romanian the website is targeting Romanian kids (actually the website is old I was in school when i made it, and I didn’t know much about seo, demographics traffic and all that things).

~~On more thing, I am always checking the pages were I left a comment on your website because I know you answer all the comments~~ nevermind I just noticed the Notify me of followup comments via e-mail

Mitch Reply:
November 6th, 2010 at 10:25 AM

LOL! Thought you had me, didn’t you Alex? Romanian; I’d have never guessed that in a million years!

And I have to admit this is the first time I’ve ever heard of “translate.google.com”; will wonders ever cease! I’ve always gone to Babelfish for translations, which doesn’t work if you don’t know what language you’re translating from. i’ll check that out; thanks.

November 5th, 2010 | 8:31 PM

DeAnna Troupe:

I am so relieved to see you address this issue, Mitch. I was having the exact same problem with Commentluv. Sometimes my blog would show and sometimes it wouldn’t. I’ve decided not to stress about that anymore. As long as my link shows up with my comment, visitors will still find the blog post.

Mitch Reply:
November 5th, 2010 at 10:31 PM

True DeAnna, but I like to try to direct them to certain posts when I can.

November 5th, 2010 | 9:22 PM

Melbourne Graphic Design:

I thought it was me who did something wrong when it was not my latest blog that appeared with my comment a few days back, Mitch. I didn’t think too much about it though because my link was still there. If you didn’t write and post this, I wouldn’t have looked into what was wrong. Same goes for the first point you have here. Thanks.

Mitch Reply:
November 6th, 2010 at 1:21 AM

It’s easy to miss stuff, Wes, and to just pass it by when it’s happening. I just see so much that it had to eventually catch my eye.

November 6th, 2010 | 12:07 AM

Jhong Medina:

“Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin” is it the same with Captcha tool Mitch. I think will try that installing that later. Second, about the commentluv thing also happens to me. Some commentluv blogs doesn’t show my post too. I’m happy my blog post show on your blog. Thanks man.

All the best!

Mitch Reply:
November 6th, 2010 at 10:22 AM

No problem Jhong. With this new plugin, you can eliminate using Captcha, which is a good thing because I can barely see those things.

November 6th, 2010 | 4:41 AM

Carolee:

Well, you know I am having problems with Firefox….since you commented on my post yesterday!.

and I DID have problems with Comment luv before, but it seems to be working today!

Mitch Reply:
November 6th, 2010 at 10:23 AM

Carolee, we’ll see how it all goes. Yup, I knew you were having issues, but didn’t want to let the cat out of the bag with my post too early. lol I’ll be monitoring CommentLuv myself today.

November 6th, 2010 | 5:58 AM

Val:

Hmmm… I use Firefox and sometimes have problems with seeing a blog post appear with your (and a few other people’s) commentluv, but what I do if it happens is delete the cookies for that person’s site and then return and the fresh cookie usually sorts it. I’m not sure what happens – maybe the cookie gets complacent?!

Not quite sure what the problem is you’re having with wordpress.com comment subs. I used to subscribe to a few people’s comments via email but it was in the days when I was new to the site and had subscribed to over-popular ones and then had to wade through hundreds or thousands of comments, and it just annoyed me. But I don’t remember being nagged via email to subscribe to comments.

By the way, I hate intense debate and disqus. Grrrr!! I’ve fallen into that trap with those two before now and now can’t delete them. Who wants all their comments preserved for posterity and then read out of context? I don’t.

As for the problem you’re having with notifications of people responding to your comments… I’m not really sure what you mean. When someone subscribes to comments on my blog, for instance, I have no idea if they are getting the email or not, I just know that ‘so many’ people are subscribed to such and such number of posts. There are certainly a couple of settings for blog owners to see, themselves, if there are comments appearing but I’m not sure if this is relevant to the problem you’re having:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/comment-notification-email
Myself, I just choose to get an email when a comment needs moderating as I moderate all comments – and so I see all comments. But I always check my dashboard anyway (blame it on OCD, lol!)

I’ve never had any emails asking me to subscribe to wp.com blogs’ comments – that’s a new one on me. Mind you, I’ve only been blogging on wp.com for a year, so maybe it was before that? Things have been changing a bit on the site recently, and some changes even since I’ve been blogging on it.

But – I’ve said this before, Mitch – I find subscribing to RSS comment feeds (of other people’s blogs, regardless of the host site) and putting them into their own filter/folder (which I just call ‘comment feeds only) a much more manageable system. That was I see all comments whether they’re posted by the blogs’ readers or authors. I’d go spare if I had to rely on email notifications as I can’t stand seeing my inbox fill up with stuff that, mostly, is of no interest to me. With an RSS feed, I can see at a glance which comments I want to read or keep or delete. I unsubscribe myself from any that either aren’t going to receive any more comments or which are authored by someone who doesn’t bother to reply at all to their readers (they annoy me in the same way that they annoy you, I seem to recall!)

Hopefully this comment of mine makes some sense, if it doesn’t or there are odd typos, my apologies, my brain’s not quite ‘back’ from the dental sedation a couple of days ago!

Mitch Reply:
November 6th, 2010 at 9:07 PM

Pat, unless you log out of WordPress every time you’re finished writing a post, it will follow you around and thus you’re set as a WordPress user. For non-Wordpress.com folks, we get an email if we select the thing that says we want notification whenever someone responds to our comment, and if we don’t subscribe to that then we just have to remember to go back to those posts we commented on to see if we got anything. I subscribe to RSS feeds to see the blogs, but not comments; that would be way too much stuff to see.

November 6th, 2010 | 6:01 PM

Sire:

I’ve actually noticed some blogs having a selection box at the bottom of the comment form that simply says, ‘tick here if you’re not a spammer.’

I think that’s pretty cool. I’m assuming the comment won’t go through unless you tick that box. Unfortunately it will only stop the spam bots and not human spammers, you need Akismet for that.

Mitch Reply:
November 6th, 2010 at 9:08 PM

Sire, I think the bots are the only thing they’re after, and truthfully I think there’s way more spam bots than human spam anyway. I just like using Akismet still because I don’t have to have people stopping to check another box, since I might or might not have people needing to check a box to subscribe to comments.

Sire Reply:
November 13th, 2010 at 6:39 PM

I reckon we’re both on the same page there Mitch. Don’t give people another unnecessary step to comment has always been my motto

Mitch Reply:
November 13th, 2010 at 7:03 PM

We’re definitely in agreement on this one, Sire, although I’ve been noticing that Akismet has been letting some messages through lately that I’d have thought it should catch.

Sire Reply:
November 13th, 2010 at 7:17 PM

This could be some people that are new on the block so to speak. As we spam them manually I’m sure Akismet will add them to their spammer lists for next time.

Mitch Reply:
November 13th, 2010 at 7:44 PM

I hope so, because the amount of spam I’m getting these days is growing. That must mean I’m starting to become more successful. lol

November 6th, 2010 | 6:41 PM

Carl:

Honestly, I think those are unnecessary plugins that can slow down blog badly. Even captcha images can be bypassed easily by latest spamming software. I think that the only useful one is reply to comment.

Mitch Reply:
November 7th, 2010 at 11:01 PM

I’ve heard that some plugins can slow blogs down, Carl, but I’ve heard of some people who have upwards of 50 plugins and seem to be doing well; I’m not quite sure how, though.

November 7th, 2010 | 9:07 PM

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