WV Support and Riding Thunder

Hey, Sam here.  It's just a tad "cooler" so far today, probably because it's more overcast.  We deserve a break after recent humidity and heat suffocation days.  But it's not noon yet, so the worst is yet to come.

Yesterday we posted on the evil Blogger word verification. We even had Jan make a badge you can use on your own blog to join the rebellion against its use Um, rebellion against the use of word verification, not our badge. The guillotine badge is in our sidebar if you want to grab it to tell your readers how you feel about wv.. 

Although we have posted on settings before, we received a request to post it again.

Blogger has a very good spam filter. We repeat, a very good one! Just because you receive spam doesn't mean it's being published. There is a huge difference. Spam is filed in the spam folder. Once a week or so, take a quick look through it to be sure none of your friends have accidentally been misfiled. Then delete all the spam. It takes a minute of your time. (We just checked our spam folder and there was no spam but one of our friends was trapped there, so we marked it as Not Spam so it could post.)

IF -- IF a spam comment should ever get published, do not delete it through comments. You want to tell Blogger it's spam so you go into the published comments in your interface and mark it as spam.

Most of the spam comes from Anonymous or name / url. Blogger can't detect name / url as spam.

The easiest way to stop both Anonymous and name / url is to not allow these types of comments.

If you want to allow them, then we suggest changing your settings to put comment moderation on posts over xxx (you choose - perhaps over 5) days old since spammers will target older posts, likely figuring they won't be noticed. (They would most likely end up in the spam folder anyway, but it pays to have Blogger send an email every time you get a comment. So be sure to keep your email address updated.)

If you want to stop Anonymous and name / url comments, we suggest you go into Settings / posts and comments and  change to -
Registered Users (includes Open ID)

And make sure the Show Word Verification answer is NO.

Don't forget to click Save Settings in upper right before you leave Settings.

We recently disallowed Anonymous because we were receiving so many spam messages we decided it was time.  They were not being published.  But that setting also allows name / url and those were being published.  We have been using Registered Users (includes Open ID) for several weeks again and haven't received any spam.  We were allowing Anonymous so a few of our non-blogging friends could comment, but they can still email us.  Many non-bloggers already have a Google profile because they're using gmail, Google+ or some other Google service, so this setting isn't really a hardship for most who will comment.  Open ID includes Wordpress,

We'd like to thank all of you who have expressed your support of our guillotine wv protest.  We hope many, many, many of you will take up the cause and whenever you manage to make it through the maze of one, to let the blogger know wv is on and suggest they turn it off.   If they aren't aware, they can't do anything.


Now for something more interesting.

Are you having a bad day? Then we'd like to share this video with you. It isn't cat or dog related, but you'll definitely feel a lot better about your own day after watching what happened to William Rankin, the man who rode Thunder.


If the video doesn't play, click here.

Compared to William Rankin, you're actually having a good day, aren't you!