It's All Fun And Games Until Someone Gets Hurt...

…is just our diabolical way of getting your attention so we can talk about an issue that is near and dear to us both: Comments.

Or more precisely: Commenter Problems. We beg you to bear with us as we sort this out with you. We love getting comments. Of course, every blogger does. But we’ve always seen our blog as a meeting-ground for likeminded (or at least, likeable) people and want the Chautauqua-members to keep chatting, as it were, and for them to not meet with frustrations as their comments seem to post then don’t, as the ugly captcha phrase at the bottom of the screen shows up out of sight and undermines their efforts, or as the Blogger boogeyman refuses to let them post at all because of obtuse i.d. issues. And all this inevitably happens after our (very dear) reader has gone to all the trouble to write a comment in real-time on the site.

Thanks to a resolute group of readers and friends, we have learned that there are two major issues: either getting a workable i.d. with which to post, or getting the post to stick.

For the first issue, it seems having a Google i.d. is the easiest. If the bugs continue, you can try another browser (Firefox seems to have the most compatibility problems with Blogger; Safari seems good for Mac users, and IE for PCs). Or (in one successful example) try re-setting your Google i.d. password.

For the second issue, we’ve tinkered extensively with the Blogger settings and hope this will help. There is no more captcha feature––which is designed to reduce spam. If we get a lot of spam, we may re-install, but for now we’re going to take our chances.

Here’s the fun and games part. Would you please please please humour us and come along for a bit of a ride so we can assess if any of you continue to have problems? Until our next post on Wednesday, would you mind trying to post just a one-line comment? We can fun it up by playing the comments like that old game where each sentence is a continuation of the last one, in a kind of random free-for-all story. If you need to try a few times to get it to post (like a few of our great readers), could you add that in parentheses to your post-attempts?

The more of you who participate, the more idea we have if we’ve worked out the kinks. If you’ve never posted before, think of it as a chance to break your commenting cherry. If you’re a regular, feel free to add to the story as many times as you’d like.

If it’s still no fun and nothing works, would you mind letting us know at “radeckiritesatgmaildotcom” (with the appropriate symbols, of course)?

And, please, nobody get hurt. Thank you so much.

Love, Deb and Barbara