What happened to WordPress’s Form Response?

A few years ago WordPress added a useful form response feature — you could add a response form to the end of a post, people would fill in the information, and the information would be sent in an e-mail. It saved them the hassle of having to compose an e-mail message to the blogger on whose blog the form appeared.

It was very useful for people who did not want to respond in a public comment, but wanted to discuss the matter in the blog post further.

I found it easy to import the responses into a database without retyping (which brings dangers of typos).

Then WordPress began adding HTML to the responses.

That was a bit of a hassle, because I’d have to save it, and strip out the HTML before it could be used.

Now they seem to have farmed this out to something called POWr, which is completely unusable.

I just don’t have the time or the inclination to jump through all the hoops they want me to jump through.

They don’t send the information in an e-mail. They send a link to a web page that is so full of lazy HTML and other unreadable spammy stuff  that it invariably gets tossed into my spam queue.

If I happen to notice it when I’m bulk deleting my spam, what I see is this:

How do you prefer to communicate?
——————————————————————————–
E-mail
——————————————————————————–
View Form Responses

This is your 2nd submission this month. Your plan allows for 25 submissions every month.
Click here to upgrade your account and receive more submissions.

Have you tried the new POWr Chat?

I must have deleted lots of them without noticing, because the subject line “How do you prefer to communicated?” gives no indication at all that this as a form response from WordPress. And then again, if I do happen to notice it when I’m bulk-deleting my spam, I find I have to click on a link to a web site so I have to wait for a browser to load up and then they want me to sign into a web page, which means looking up in another program to find if I have a user name and password for that particular site.

It’s just not worth it.

If I could, I’d remove all the “Form Response” thingies from all my blog posts, as they are now useless, but that would be extremely time-consuming and difficult.

So if you see a response form at the end of any of my blog posts, please don’t be tempted to use it. Just send me an e-mail instead.

Why do people provide something simple and useful, and then replace it with something complex and useless?

 

Akismet and persistent spammer

For the last few days someone calling itself MichaelDes or MichaelDus has been desperately trying to post spam comments on one of my blogs, and I’ve been getting notifications of each attempt.

Normally such things are just marked as spam without any notification, so I’m wondering why the Akismet spam checker isn’t handling these in the normal way. Any other bloggers having problems with spam comments from MichaelDes?

I’ve set my mail reader to automatically delete the notifications, but I still have to go to the blog and mark the comments in the moderation queue as spam.

Twitter vs Facebook and blog stats

This blog got the biggest number of hits over the last 30 days on 21 February, when I re-announced an old post on Home Schooling and Bigotry on both Facebook and Twitter.

I just checked the blog stats for that day, and the home schooling post was the most popular. It was interesting, though, that 45 visitors were referred from Facebook, and only 2 from Twitter.

I’m not a great one for stats, and don’t often look at them, though I have noticed that since I moved this blog from Blogger to WordPress the number of visitors dropped drastically and still hasn’t recovered. I moved it because the Blogger editor became more difficult to use.

But another blog I read, A Pilgrim in Narnia, had an article on blogging stats, and so I thought I’d take a closer look at them. And it seems that that blog, too, gets far more hits from Facebook than from Twitter.

Perhaps as a result of this, Twitter has started trying to imitate the Facebook way of doing things, and I suspect that that will cause them to lose a lot more ground a lot more quickly. Instead of doing what Twitter did well, the people at Twitter are trying to do what Facebook does, and doing it badly.

To start with, Twitter was a quick and concise way of sharing information, if necessary with links to where one could get more detail (so great for announcing blog posts). The 140 character limit ensured that. But then they added pictures, which made nonsense of the 140-character limit. Now, like Facebook, they are deciding what to show people, which means that big organisations get more exposure than individuals, and eventually the individuals will leave Twitter to the big organisations to tweet to each other.

There were other tools that enabled one to fine related material on blogs, but they’ve all killed themselves off, perhaps by trying, like Twitter, to emulate the Facebook model instead of doing something useful and unique. There were Technorati and BlogCatalog, which killed themselves off in that way.

So statistically, at any rate, Facebook seems to be one of the best ways of announcing blog posts at the moment

 

 

10th Anniversary of Notes from Underground blog

It’s ten years since I started this blog, which I’ve kept going more or less continuously since then.

It was the day that we got an ADSL broadband connection to the Internet, instead of dial-up, with a whole 2 Gigabytes monthly allowance, so for the first time I browsed the Web instead of just going to a specific site, looking at what I needed to look at, and logging off. And in doing that I encountered the Blogger site, and so started this blog on a whim, because Blogger looked easy to use.

I already had three online journals, so I thought starting a new one was an extravagance, but Blogger looked easier to use than the others — you could just start typing stuff. The others had a much clunkier user interface. The LiveJournal one is still there, though I don’t use it much any more.  I was introduced to that by Bishop Seraphim Sigrist, who still blogs there, and what he writes is always worth reading. One of the nice things about LiveJournal is that you can have “friends”, whose journals can be presented to you in a continuous feed, so you can see what they have written. You can see my LiveJournal friends feed here. The other online journals were on Yahoo 360 (long since killed by Yahoo), and something called MyDiary, which had the clunkiest user interface of all.

But Blogger had a streamlined user interface that made it easy to just write thoughts down — ideas that you wanted to share and discuss with people, half-baked ideas that you wanted other people to help you bake by commenting on them, adding to them, or even shooting them down.

When I started this blog on Blogger I didn’t even know what to say, but a blog is supposed to be, first of all, a web log, a log of web sites visited, so I wrote about a site for finding old friends, and you can see the first post here Notes from underground: Seek and ye shall find, And yes, the “Reverse People Finder” I wrote about is still there, and you can still use it.

You may have noticed that this post is not on the original site. blogspot.com, and that is because quite soon after I started blogging there, Google, who had taken over Blogger, began messing with the blog editor, and it suddenly became a lot more difficult to use, and lots of things didn’t work any more. In 2006 there was a mass migration of bloggers from Blogger to the WordPress platform, and I started a blog on WordPress, called Khanya, just to be on the safe side. At first it was there as a kind of emergency fallback, in case Blogger became completely unusable, but then I began using it for different things, so the two blogs continued side by side. Eventually the Blogger editor stabilised, and I continued to use it for quick ‘n dirty posts. One major difference was that WordPress allowed you to use captions on pictures, but Blogger made it easier to add pictures without captions.

So it continued until Google began messing with the Blogger editor again, which you can read about here Notes from underground: Blogger’s new user-hostile interface and other atrocities. So I moved the whole blog over to WordPress, and all was well until WordPress began messing with their editor and introduced the new Beep Beep Boop one, which I found completely unusable, and at one point, when they hid the old editor so I could not find it, I began using the old site again. Bad as the new Blogger editor was, it was still better than the new WordPress one. Eventually I found where WordPress had hidden the old editor, and though it is a schlep to find, at least it is still there.

Unless your a dedicated blogger, you probably haven’t got this far, because of all that boring stuff about blog writing software. One result of the deterioration of blogging software is that people have been abandoning blogs and prefer to use sites like Facebook. It’s a pity, because there are many things for which blogs are a much better medium than sites like Facebook. For one thing you can easily find stuff again, even years later, whereas on Facebook you can spend half an hour looking for something that was posted five minutes before, and anything more than 3 days old is gone forever.

There was something else to record on this day 10 years ago. We were visited by an old friend, Trevor Stone. I didn’t blog about that at the time, so I’ll add it here. I knew Trevor from Namibia in the early 1970s. He had come from the UK as a volunteer to work at the Anglican mission at Odibo in Ovamboland as a mechanic maintaining the church  vehicles.

Monday 28 November 2005

Trevor Stone, Pretoria, 28 Nov 2005

Trevor Stone came to see us. He brought news of people from Namibia that I had not heard, and has remained active in support of the work of the Anglican Church there. I learned that Nestor Kakonda, who in the early 1970s had been secretary of St Mary’s Mission, had been killed in a South African raid on Cassinga in Angola, during the wars there. Trevor collected books about Namibian history, and collected information especially about the Kwanyama people and their history. He was arranging for collections of Kwanyama artifacts in Britain to be photographed, so that they could be sent to the University of Namibia and schools there, to be available to students so they could know their own history.

 

 

WordPress, please fix this bug!

I sometimes want to make a comment on a self-hosted WordPress blog, and I’m asked to enter my e-mail address, my name and my web page address.

When I do, I get this message:

Are you Steve Hayes?

You are being asked to login because shayes@dunelm.org.uk is used by an account you are not logged into now.

By logging in you’ll post the following comment to The Anniversary Gift:

So I log in, and it takes me to the dashboard of my blog.

I navigate my way back to the blog I wanted to comment on, and enter the information again, and it responds:

Are you Steve Hayes?

You are being asked to login because shayes@dunelm.org.uk is used by an account you are not logged into now.

By logging in you’ll post the following comment to The Anniversary Gift:

And so on, ad infinitum.

This bug has been reported before, long ago, and it is extremely annoying. And its one reason I think self-hosted blogs are a bad idea.

 

 

Nothing to write about

I was thinking of writing a new blog post, but was offered WordPress’s unusable new Beep Beep Boop editor, or rather it’s imporve user experience, and a horrible experience it is, because as an editor I find it quite unusable.

They have now improved it to the extent that I can’t see what I’m typing, because what I’m typing is blow the visible screen, and so if there are any typos I won’t see them until this is posted,..

And they no longer seem to ovffer the option of switching to the old editor,

The y have “improved” it again, so that the only optiojns are to “Connect new service” (whatever that means,) and “Publish immediately”

There are some other things there, but I can’tm make out what they sasy, not even when I hold a magnifying glass to the screen, because THERE IS TOO LITTLE CONTRAST.I can’t enter tags or categories any more. It last half of what I was tryping.

I moved this blog from Blogger when they m,essed up their editor, but it’s beginning to look like I’ll have to move it back again.

Testing WordPress

Just testing to see if WordPress will let me post.

If this appears, it will let me post text, but it doesn’t seem to want to let me post links or pictures.

Here is a picture:

 

 

This is a link — click on it.

You can’t even enter a link manually <a href=”https://ondermynende.wordpress.com”>this is a link – click on it</a>

Hey, WordPress — have you ever heard of the saying — if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?

I don’t want an “improved posting experience”, I just want an editor that works.

I hate it when softweare developers promise an improved “experience”.

Every time I see that, I know what it will be — reduced functionality, and the main experience is frustration.

When they offer an “improved experience” it always means more bells and whistles, fewer pistons and cylinders.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whew! Back to normal

By reading the Beep Beep Boop screen with a magnifying glass, I could just make out a place to click to restore the old editor that works properly.

Beep beep boop

I want to post something on this blog, and all Woprdpress gives me is

beep beep boop

and a glaring white screen with pale gray writing on a dazzling white background that I can’t read, so I don’t know what I’m doing.

Why do they want to force me to use a crippled dysfunctional editor?

I suppose this is one of their bloody experiments where they call reduced functionality “an enhanced user experience”.

I was going to post something but there’s not enough contrast between text and background to read much other than Beep Beep Bloody Boop.

The illegibility of WordPress

Whose idea was it to fill WordPress blogs with illegible fonts?

I recently wrote a comment in another blog, and the first line of my comment was this:

The Facebook world is very much a Web 1.0 world.

but all I could see of it was this:

Th     l  l    ll i   i  mu h i   l       i l l.

The vertical strokes in the letters are visible, horizontal strokes are faint, and diagonal strokes fainter still, so that in a word like “Facebook” all one can see are the vertical strokes of the b and the k, which make the word look like ”    l  l”.

The blog post in question was Church in a Facebook World | Liturgy, where the blog says that it is “Powered by Headway, the drag and drop WordPress theme”, but most of WordPress’s public and help pages seem to be written in the same barely legible font. The list of Categories in the right column where I am writing this are in the same illegible font.

I really couldn’t be bothered to read most of the comments on that blog, because peering at the screen trying to work out what the words are leaves one so exhausted that it isn’t worth bothering to think of what those words are trying to say.

These are not the Dead Sea Scrolls or some other ancient documents that have to be deciphered after being exposed to the vagaries of the climate, insects and other hazards for thousands of years. Why make text on a computer screen look like a badly-fixed paper photograph that has been left out in the sun?

You can surely devise fonts with a face and colour that contrasts enough with the background to make them legible. So why do the people at WordPress seem to go out of their way to make them hard to read? Are they trying to kill blogging?