WordPress.com and comments.
Fortunately for me, I made the decision after a mere couple of weeks to switch from WordPress.com to WordPress.org, so I am not affected by the current difficulty with comments that bloggers on WordPress.com are experiencing. Phew!
However, it is becoming a sizeable problem particularly in the political blogosphere, where commentators are more likely to have good reason to use an alternative name to comment under. Sometimes for reasons of wit – the rash of commentators claiming to be Raisa, as mounted by David Cameron for instance – sometimes because they work in sensitive jobs and whilst they don’t mind the owner of the blog site knowing who they are, they might not wish to advertise their true identity to the rest of the world, or their employer.
Since Wednesday, ‘anonymous’ commentators using a genuine e-mail address have been met by a message saying:
‘That email address is associated with an existing wordpress account, please log in to use it’.
This message baffled a horde of commentators who had no idea that they did have a wordpress account, nor idea of how to loggin into it.
Apparently the problem can be traced back to a troll who had been posting comments using the e-mail address and avatar of Matt Cutts. Matt who? For the uninitiated, Matt Cutts is the CEO of Google, and when you are the CEO of Google being annoyed by a troll and you decide to stamp your foot, it can be a pretty heavy handed stamp indeed.
Software engineers were dispatched to the dimly lit cellar to come up with a solution. Back in 2007, Gravatar (which is where you went to get those dinky pictures that link to your e-mail address and pop up when you comment) and WordPress conducted a trendy civil partnership. Gravatar customers were automatically awarded wordpress accounts. By Thursday afternoon, the software engineers had flicked a switch which stopped anyone using, oh, lets say for instance, Matt Cutts e-mail address along with his avatar to leave unhelpful comments on the web. They had also stopped the flow of witty comments and helpful information from individuals across the world who wished to comment anonymously, or under a temporary name on political blogs. A small price to pay when the Boss is upset.
Just lurve the ‘Happiness Engineers’ – straight out of Orwell newspeak!
This is version.1 of the comment update, v.2 is being worked on feverishly as we speak. It is an interesting development for a company which says it is committed to cutting down on Spam – for the one group of people who would never dream of using a genuine e-mail address are Spammers. They remain entirely unaffected by this development! Meanwhile those who do use their genuine e-mail address which they long ago attached to their avatar and have since lost their password, can get round the problem by either using the WordPress url in the above graphic, not using a genuine e-mail address, or looking to see if the web site they wish to comment on has a ‘loggin’ facility in the Meta bar.
If they do have a loggin button on the meta bar, you can use that to loggin to wordpress, and tick the box that says ‘remember me’ . You will be presented with a message saying ‘You do not have permission to access this dashboard’ – but ignore that, and return to the normal front page of the blog – you will find you have magically managed to loggin to a WordPress account that you didn’t even know you had!
I understand that WordPress have been deluged with complaints from bloggers who don’t want their commentators to have to loggin in when they comment, so much so that they have closed comments on the forum page where they made the announcement….
Thank God for WordPress.org – there’s always a catch when something is free. Like WordPress.com.
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1
March 17, 2012 at 11:26 -
Aaaaah, so that’s why I could sti comment here, but not at Insp Gadget’s or The Angey Exile’s! I thought you must have had some third-party comment system…
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2
March 17, 2012 at 12:11 -
Yep, its certainly sorting out the cheapskates from the boys….
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3
March 18, 2012 at 03:30 -
It’s more being time poor than cash poor for me. Although I’ve had the WP account for years I’ve only been blogging on it for a couple of months, and have found enough reasons to self host but not the time to look into the issues of who/what/where/how etc. It was very much a job for ‘Ron’ but if the WP twunts don’t put things back it may well turn into a job for ASAP.
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4
March 18, 2012 at 05:39 -
Luckily, the workaround link in AE’s post has sorted me out.
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5
March 17, 2012 at 11:33 -
What fun we can have on the net
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6
March 17, 2012 at 11:44 -
so is wordpress.org what you use when you pay the upgrade of about 99 dollars a year? I might have to do that!
QRG
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7
March 17, 2012 at 13:34
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8
March 17, 2012 at 12:08 -
I just had this problem on a blog using my genuine GMail address, but then I used my Yahoo! email address and it was OK.
It seems to be the Gmail domain that is the problem. I have never had anything to do with Gravatar. I did have something to do with WordPress years ago but I can’t remember if I used my GMail account or not.
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9
March 17, 2012 at 12:24 -
Its also fallout from the ill conceived EU cookie laws.
Websites used to use cookies to help collect marketing statistics. Which the EU thinks is bad so they banned them.
The workaround to the EU laws is simple. Require a login to your site. The act of login requires a cookie (how the web works), which is completely legal. And there will be a privacy statement/EULA which states that information is collected for marketing purposes (again legal). Dont like it. Simple you cant use the site content.
With the old system, I could delete my cookies, not get tracked by marketing companies, and use the site content.
The end result is, not only are your surfing habits still tracked, they are now tied to a email address which is more useful for the marketing companies than pre EU cookie law.
Its a variation of the same trick that created supermarket “loyalty cards” when privacy laws where implemented.
I don’t see this as another example of evil EU (the UK government would have done the same thing eventually). Its symptomatic overall that the people who make the laws don’t understand the domain they are legislating for.
Web sites have been given a grace period of 1 year (UK) to change their sites (expires June this year). The maximum fine for non-compliance is 500,000 GBP.
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10
March 17, 2012 at 14:04 -
This may spell the end for the ‘After Watt’ blog… Heavens! How awful!!
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11
March 17, 2012 at 14:33 -
Happiness Engineers?
Think I must missed that lecture at university. So did quite a lot of my working colleagues….
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12
March 17, 2012 at 15:41 -
I tried to register a Gravatar some while back, but couldn’t get the bloody thing to work. It looks like that was a good thing!
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13
March 17, 2012 at 17:17 -
Just create yourselves an all purpose web id, name and linked email, for commenting anonymously. I use Ed Butt sometimes after creating it to stop idiots on CiF from following me to my sites and telling me what an evil, right wing, creationist nutter I am. I didn’t mind being a nutter but I am a non theist and an anarchist.
My favourite web pseudonym is one used by someone who comments on my friend Sally Dwyer’s page. He calls himself Waddac Hunt.
What, obscene? It sounds like a genuine Welsh name to me.
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14
March 17, 2012 at 19:12 -
Hi Anna,
Totally off topic but just wanted to let you know my CT scan was clear so another six months before I need to start worrying again!
Carol
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16
March 18, 2012 at 01:33 -
I always just lie about my identity and make up email addresses.As long as you have an @ and a . Anything will do.why does any blog need my email anyway? I don’t want you to write to me.
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17
March 18, 2012 at 15:04 -
All the more reason to self host it seems.
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18
March 19, 2012 at 13:44 -
Side note, Matt Cutts isn’t the CEO of Google he’s one of their spokesmen who deals mostly with SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) stuff. As a lot of the people in this field tend to be a bit dodgy he tends to garner a lot of hate whenever Google changes things to stop sneaky tricks aimed at boosting search rankings.
I’m not siding with Google or anything here, a lot of the stuff they’ve done recently is a bit dubious but I just thought I’d make that point.
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