Piggy Buddy and Verification

Hey, everyone, I'm finally here.  Blogger kept loading a little x-box with no photo but it finally loaded the real me. I have lots to say today, so I'm going to get right to the news. 

We've had some questions about where we got the blue section bowl Buddy our ravenous pig ... um, our too-rapid-swallow-whole eater has his nose in.  We got the bowl from a review we did in 2008 on DogPauseBowls.  We had questions and posted on How the DogPauseBowls Work shortly after that.  They are made by a company called -- big surprise! -- DogPause.  Buddy doesn't recommend it for the obvious reason that it slows down his eating but Jan likes it for the same reason.

We are sorry that Jaime of Thoughts for Paws has lost another beloved pet to cancer.  This time it was her sister's Basset Hound Henry the Peanut. We send purrs, woofs and pawhugs to the family.

Bitey & Beau

We were aware that River the Beagle's brother Beau died January 17 but we didn't know Beau's birth brother Bitey died on February 2, just two weeks later. We had so hoped this would be a happier year for River's family after their losses in 2011.  We send purrs, woofs and pawhugs to his family also.


We have written on this subject before but this time we are so frustrated we were seriously tempted to delete all blogger blogs with word verification from our bookmarked list and Google Reader.  Why?  Because blogger word verification  is unnecessary and time wasting!  Blogger has had a good spam filter for a long time now and many are not taking advantage of the filter. 

It seems like a week ago already but we think it was Thursday blogger suddenly changed their word verification process and many bloggers (including us) are already fed up with trying to leave a comment on any blog using it.  It is putting up one word and one totally unintelligible non-word with a dark background that a computer program can't decipher but neither can we.  And that crap it has about if we get it wrong, not to worry, we can just keep trying and getting rejected?  Forget it!  No one has time or patience to play innumerable stupid word games. 

And don't be fooled by thinking if visitors don't want to play word games, they can just use the audio.  Have you tried the audio?  We did, in total desperation.  And the background noise is so loud we couldn't make out the mumble of the numbers we were supposed to be typing.

We don't want to tell anyone what to do, but we strongly suggest if you'd like visitors to read your blog posts AND leave a comment that you turn off word verification. 

Anonymous comments are generally but not always spam comments.  We have friends who don't blog so we hated to turn off Anonymous comments but we did so Friday and switched to Registered Users (includes Open ID) to see how that works. If it causes you any problems, please let us know..  Our goal is to make your visit easy and fun.

We already had comment moderation turned on for older posts only.  That is where our spam was being left.  Blogger was tossing it into the spam file but it does waste our time deleting it and blogger's time saving it for us to delete. We (ir)regularly check our spam list to be sure blogger has not accidentally relegated any friends' comments there and then delete.

Blogger does do a good job of filtering.  If you ever do get a spam comment, don't just delete it from the post.  Go to the comment list to find it, check the box in front of it and tell blogger it's spam by clicking the spam button.  It isn't hard to train the filter to tell the difference.

If you don't know how to turn off word verification, ask us or another blogger.  We'd be happy to help if we can.   You can not see word verification on your own blog when signed in, so perhaps you've had word verification turned on so long you no longer realize you have it on.  Check your settings.  If you don't know how to find them, ask someone.  We're all here to help each other.

Of course, if you don't want to turn off word verification, we'll still visit you and so will many others, but we won't be able to leave comments.

PS - We just read  Little Cat Feet's post Word Purgatory and just love the way they described the new wv audio.  Stop by and read it.  It's short.  :)

Oh, and PPS - Frankie Furter has found the good in this new trial and error wv frustration.  And he's right.  Outta EVERY.. BAD THINGY...  You get the idea