Wednesday 30 January 2013

Posting Comments on Blogs

In the last couple of days I've noticed that I am having trouble posting comments on other people's blogs.  Other blogs don't seem to recognise that I'm logged into Google/Blogger and won't let me publish the comments.  I found some advice on the Tech Zone blog.

It seems that my 'favourite' thing - cookies, could be to blame once more.  I toddled off and checked my Internet settings but I had already set Internet Explorer to accept 3rd party cookies (probably during the trial and error of trying to get Blogger not to count my own page views), so I'm not preventing people commenting on my blogs - it didn't help with the problem of commenting on other people's though.

I also note that I am not alone in having this problem, in fact when I Googled the topic I got a page full of relevant hits. 

Trying another suggested angle I have just investigated OpenID - apparently I have one already - well fancy that! 

So off I went back to  A Family Tapestry, where I'd already tried several times to get the page to recognise me as a Blogger user with my Google password, and retyped my comment (I knew I should have copied it to Notepad, but you only think of these things afterwards) and this time I selected OpenID from Select profile drop down.  I had to paste in my Blogger URL (barnsleyhistorian.blogspot.co.uk) another page asked me for some confirmation and then it took me back to A Family Tapestry.  But ... (fanfare) ... this time when I clicked Publish it worked.

My comment on A Family Tapestry today
So it wasn't straightforward but it did work. 

Trying to comment on another blog I follow, Olive Tree Genealogy, (I've never been this chatty!) I hit on the CAPCHA problem.  That's where no matter how many times you try entering the mystery word it won't recognise that you've got it right.  The site knew I was BarnsleyHistorian this time (unlike A Family Tapestry) but trying to publish my comment with that option selected it just kept telling me I was wrong.  So I tried the OpenID option ... and again ... success.  Though comments are moderated on this blog so I'll need to check back later to see if my posting was truly successful.

3 comments:

BarnsleyHistorian said...

The post on Olive Tree was successful - I wonder if this comment on my own blog will work with my Google Account?

BarnsleyHistorian said...

Today I tried to post a friendly comment on a blog whose writer had commented on mine. No can do, neither Google Account or OpenID work. Drat.

BarnsleyHistorian said...

I just wish I could get on with writing this blog, but simple things like trying to add friendly comments to other peoples' blogs have just taken two and three quarter hours to partially solve (look at the time check on the comment above). I can comment in Firefox, but not in Internet Explorer 9. Looks as if I'm not the only one judging by the forums. And Blogger is happily tracking my page views again - I really thought I cracked that one.