Many of you may recall earlier commentaries of mine (okay, rants) lamenting Blogspot.com’s practice of not enabling blog commenters to identify themselves with a linkable nickname (i.e., click the name to go to the commenter’s blog).
Well, to their credit, Blogger has restored this functionality, to some extent. If the Blogger user employs "word verification" to authenticate comments, as shown below, then you can elect to use your Blogger ID, your OpenID, or *trumpet fanfare* any nickname and link it to a URL. To wit:
And if you follow through with the method above, your comment looks like this, where the name "Kestrel" is linked to my blog:
However, if you don’t use "word verification," then you get this layout:
The resulting comment starts off like so:
The name "kestrelsaerie" is still a link, but it’s to kestrelsaerie.wordpress.com. If you click it, you get to my old blog at wordpress.com, rather than this self-hosted site. Now, there is an explanation and another link to this site, but isn’t that more than a bit of a kludge?
Now, I know one of the theories of blogging holds that you don’t want to inhibit, in any way, the ability of your readers to comment. On the other hand, if we want to propagate blogging, and more to the point, WoW blogging, wouldn’t we prefer that we, and our readers, can easily follow links to other sites of interest?
Both methods of enabling comments in Blogger have pros and cons. This recent change (actually, I only noticed it today; no idea how long it’s been (re)enabled) is a step in the right direction, but it still doesn’t fully promote "open blogging."
Yay! I think I’m going to put it on word verification since it’s not that hard to type in 5 letters whereas not everyone has a wordpress.com/blogger account.
Thanks for the update! I’d've never noticed myself.
Thanks, Trollin’!
To be honest, I am not sure what the default is for Blogger; I probably should have researched and included that info.
If anyone wants to let me know, I’ll edit TOA to include that information.
It’s enabled for a couple of weeks now.
Word verification is enabled by default I believe.
Thanks, Horns!
*goes to enable word verification*
I first noticed it back in December and posted about it. They’ve fiddled with it back and forth too. Apparently it’s not the default setting and some bloggers don’t know to go in and fix it.
GD, I remember your post, and I looked then (well shortly after), but didn’t see it. But I think I’d have noticed before now, with as many Blogger blogs I comment on.
At any rate, it’s good to see. Maybe they’ll finally figure out how to make it ALL good.
Yah… definitely not default as your name on a recent comment went to your old blog – Doh! So I’m fixing it too! Thanks for the heads up, I appreciate it.