Cotton's PSA and Decision

Hey, I'm Cotton. Sorry, but I fell asleep while waiting to use the computer. And it's been a long wait, but Jan finally made a decision.

First though, a Public Service Announcement from Zoolatry. Ann has a very good post on why many blog readers would appreciate it if the the word verification found on many blogs would be disabled and why it can be a hardship for those with a disability. Jan has health problems that are affected by her computer time too and she has been glad to be spending more time away from the computer lately.

We can't speak for other blogs, such as Wordpress, but Blogger has been doing a terrific job of filtering out spam for quite a while now. It has become rare that a spam message gets through and has to be deleted from a post or that a good message ends up in with spam. But bloggers have to do their part. It's easy. Just go to comments in your dashboard (check them occasionally if you choose not to receive email notifications) and check/clear your spam folder.

An easy way to keep up with what is posted on your blog and what is not is to have Blogger send an email for each new comment. If the email asks whether permission to post or delete, that comment has not been posted, so you just delete it from the Blogger spam folder nest time you think of it. But you have to keep your email address current. Just go to -

Dashboard.
Comments.
Scroll down to "Comment Notification Email" and type in your email address.
Click Save Settings.

But before you save your settings, you might want to change "Who Can Comment" to only registered users. We used to allow anonymous comments because we have non-blogging friends, but since many spammers try to post a comment as Anonymous, we finally had to change the setting.

We understand why many of you use word verification but as Ann points out, there is also the problem of time, often having to do two or more verifications, as some are almost impossible to read. A big problem for us is that we have the slowest DSL and way too frequently, there is such a delay, we think our comment went through, but as we are already leaving the site we glimpse word verification appearing. So we either wasted our time making the comment or we have to go back and do it again.

We thank Zoolatry for her Disable for the Disabled graphic and for the post. We don't know that all of you will be able to disable word verification for one reason or another but we hope at least many of you can.

Our last post was to let you know where we were with our blog at the time, but so many left advice on what to do with stolen content, which was not the problem, so we took the post down.

We were trying to warn you about a site using hundreds or thousands of bloggers RSS feed posts to steal your traffic - not steal your post - to boost their own traffic in search engine rankings - and to get visitors to download a program. All bloggers should be doing a periodic Google search of your own blog name. Don't search for this company, as you will only increase their their "popularity," but if you see brokencontrollers.com/yourblog name, you might want to ask them to remove each of your posts and links from their site. Which they will do but you have to notice them and make the request.

Their are many reasons a blogger needs or wants a domain name. But we will never own JFF dot com again. It wasn't because Jan didn't try to pay them for the domain names. They just kept refusing to accept her payment.

As long as we keep posting on JFF, our old dot com will be following us and can be resold. Today it is owned by a foreign company and it's all ads. Tomorrow it could be purchased by a porn site. Jan really wants to end JFF so this can't ever happen, but she just doesn't have the time or energy to start over and try to build up a new blog, a new zazzle store, Twitter, and everything we're signed up with. And Jan has been busy trying to downsize as we might have to move.

Reluctantly and with trepidation, this blog stays open, but we're going to have to find a new heart for it.

Stop right here. And read the last line again. The way it was written, not the way you are expecting it to read. Please.