2023-08-18 Comments on other blogs

I'm up early because my bones ache in the morning. When neither me nor my wife work, I usually do stuff for an hour or so and then I go back to bed.

As for comments on other blogs… I try to avoid that, these days. I have uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger and NoScript installed.

This flags me as suspicious and I usually have to solve captchas, identifying things in images. This makes me feel exploited, because I'm probably training some AI, and it annoys me, because it's boring. I'm extra annoyed if I have to answer more than one captcha.
I usually have to enable some scripts but I also don't want to roll over so I need to check the various domains they are from and make decisions that are entirely unrelated to leaving a comment: fonts OK, analytics not OK, … I already need to do that for the "Post a Comment" link to work.
I want notifications for replies but then I eventually get notified of spam replies years later. When this happens, there's usually no fast way to remove all the notification subscriptions, or they wan me to log in and that requires my laptop to find the password, and my phone for the two-factor authentication or text message, and it just makes me so tired.

I have really soured on Blogspot and WordPress comments. 😒

Now, of course it is unreasonable to make my blogging experience so bad. But at the same time, it really angers me that they're making me do this or the ad companies will make records of me. I find that even more revolting. Most of the time I'm OK, though. I just don't comment any more.

I used to comment a lot.

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Why can’t I just get the HTML from your site and read the damn thing? And which parts would I have to unblock in order to comment? Makes me lose all interest in commenting.

Privacy Badger

uBlock Origin

NoScript

#Blogs #Ads

Comments

Now that I’m looking at the uBlock Origin screenshot again, and thinking back to my notes about Firefox in 2018-11-14 Firefox Setup, I made sure to block 3rd-party scripts and 3rd-party frames, globally (in the second column, not the third column). The uBlock Origin wiki has good documentation: Dynamic filtering: quick guide.

2018-11-14 Firefox Setup

Dynamic filtering: quick guide

– Alex 2023-08-18 12:33 UTC

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I went back to that blog again, enabled one domain after another, reloading, trying to log into my Google account, to no avail. Disabled Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin completely, to no avail. Switched over to Chromium, disabled Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin completely, to no avail.

I think I just can’t leave comments any more unless I use a submissive corporate browser. Maybe it would work from the phone.

What a mess.

My recommendation to everybody: Add an email address to your blog.

– Alex 2023-08-19 09:48 UTC

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Nope, doesn’t work from the iPhone either, using Firefox or Safari. I guess I’d have to remove the ad-blockers there, too.

But by now I’m no longer in the mood to leave a comment.

– Alex 2023-08-19 09:52 UTC