Dear fellow bloggers,

This topic gets me so riled up that I had to put the post title in all caps to properly convey my emotions.

If you have this turned on for your blog:


Give me one good reason why you have it.
Just one.

Is it that you don’t have to deal with spam? What if I told you that my bride blog on blogger gets an average of 200 visitors a day right now (at one point I was close to 500!), and I hardly dealt with any spam in all that time.

Have you been whining about comments lately? Have you stopped to think that maybe turning off word verification would encourage people to comment more often?

You say to me “Why don’t you care enough about me to leave a comment on my blog?”

And I say to you “Why don’t you care enough about your readers to make talking to you as easy as possible?”

I am thisclose to instituting a No Comment If Verification policy for myself.

If you don’t want to deal with going to your blog to delete spam, just enable the “approve all comments” option for Blogger. This means that you can filter out any spam messages before they ever go up on your blog. But your loyal readers don’t have to squint and strain their eyes to deciper a code like asodifj09239408 with a line drawn through it.

How about you turn it off for 1 month? Or 2? And then decide if you are being overwhelmed with messages about hot babes in bikinis.

I’m feeling snarky so I’m going to go ahead and say it: Odds are, your blog isn’t even popular enough for the spammers to care about.

Whew, was that rude? Are you all going to stop reading now? Because it’s likely true. None of my blogs have been popular enough to get attacked on a daily or weekly basis (well, I do get some spam on That Wife, but with WordPress I don’t have to deal with it).  That Bride has 285 subscribers on Google Reader. Since April 18, 2008 That Bride has had 83,704 page views (according to Google Analytics, the number is 92,000 according to statcounter), and even with all of those pageviews, I’ve still only deleted a few spam comments. Statcounter tells me I’ve had 62,385 unique visitors at That Bride. Out of those 62,385 maybe 20 have spammed me. Maybe.

I’m not trying to brag. I’m just trying to use statistics to prove my point. I’ve heard that numbers can be very convincing.

So TURN IT OFF. TURN IT OFF. TURN IT OFF.

If you do, you  might see me popping by to say hello a little more often!

Love ya!

That Wife

P.S.-If you are using blogger, and you are clueless about how to turn verification off, leave a comment and I’ll reply with step-by-step instructions on how to either turn word verification off, or turn the feature to approve all comments on.

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