We seem to have been detoured off the Infobahn and onto yet another long and winding washboard gravel road to Hell as regards what should be the simple process of posting a comment on the DogS(h)ite.
I first noticed the latest WordPress “enhancement” the other day while trying to comment on the Better Burque blog. Being logged into WP, I assumed — wrongly, as it turned out — that I could write my comment and post it under my nom de blog.
But when I wrote my little piece, then clicked the “Reply” button, nothing happened. Or so it seemed. There was no visual cue that the button had been clicked. My comment just sat there, like a fresh turd on a flat rock.
So I clicked the “Reply” button again and immediately got a popup that said something like, “Oops! Looks like you’ve already said that!”
And so I had. The comment had been posted, but not as me — as Anonymous, who seems to be everywhere these days, and mostly up to no good, too.
Anyway, I forgot all about it because I comment on the DogS(h)ite from the Comments tab in WP and never actually see the preposterous clusterfuckery that appears at the bottom of each post, the way you Little People do.
Nevertheless, there it squats, like a poison toad, a probe from the WP Block Editor that has infiltrated my Classic Editor environment, bent on mischief.
Now, I just viewed the blog using my backup MacBook and a different browser (Chrome) that was not logged into WordPress. So I got the full nickel tour of Whatthefuckopolis.
And what an ugly neighborhood it is, too. Frank Lloyd Wrong on the brown acid designing the Hotel California for a Wes Anderson movie.
It seems navigable, but I didn’t go through the entire process of logging in with an email address or my Google, Apple, or WP deets because I don’t want to get caught in some digital Doom Loop that drops me onto the Event Horizon just before everything goes sideways in orbit around Neptune.
I will ping the Happiness Engineers about it. There must be a way to return to the simpler days of commenting, before some engineer decided to go all carbon-fiber, hydraulic-disc and electronic-shifting on us.
Mad Blog Media 
Klaatu barada nikto?
“I’m impatient with stupidity.” — Klaatu
WP never seems to work the same way twice!
Yeah, the Better Burque comment window has changed again since last I looked at it. I have no idea what in Billy Hell is going on with WP these days. It’s about as user-friendly as an Albanian school-board meeting.
A month or so ago, there was a week where I couldn’t reply. But it went away, haven’t seen anything I’d call a show-stopper since. Just lots of ankle biters.
I think it’s an odd design choice to shoehorn the reader commenting feature into the “new” WordPress block-style editor window. Do I really need to BOLD or italicize my thoughts? They were worth two cents to start with, now their up to an extra ha’penny?
And in theme of “does anyone do code reviews anymore,” there seems to be an extra click, on Safari at least, just to start typing. The box has a clickable field that says “Write a reply,” but when you click it, you can’t start writing yet. It morphs to “Start writing or type/to choose a block,” and you have to click in one more time.
I swear, whenever you’re talking code, I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that no one submitting pull requests actually uses the app in question.
… now
theirthey’re up to. …(Okay, so maybe having an editor window can be nice … )
Yeah, I noticed the extra click in Safari too. Pointless and irksome. The goal should be simplicity.
Here’s what the comment window looks like on the backend, in the Classic Editor. What’s so terrible about this? Think, type, hit “Reply,” bing bang boom. Anything else is window-dressing, on a par with grafting a pair of big tits onto a motor.
• Click here to embiggen.
Of course, given how cumbersome/clusterfuckish using WordPress as a Reader of WordPress sites is, shouldn’t expect much more. It’s so much fun to start reading a blog entry, then have three distractions recommended upon me before I can get to the comments.
Happiness Engineer pinged. I’ll let all y’all know what I hear.
Better Burque seems to have devolved to something a little less onerous as regards comments (check his comments box here). I should ask Scot how he’s working his site. I’m striving mightily to avoid abandoning the Classic Editor for the accursed Block Editor, which I hate with the heat of 10,000 suns.
Knock, knock, knock. Is anybody there? I can’t see out of this damn box. Hello! Hello!
That’s it! I’m off to the post office with my comment. You don’t mind a post card of one of those Jackalopes do you? Your address is still Walt & Jesse’s 24Hour mart, attention: General Delivery right?
Oh well, a sign of the times. I still can’t believe the job title “happiness engineer.” Happiness comes from a bike saddle or a fretboard not some stupid screen. For whoever coined that job title, and I would love to see the job description, I give you this.
Hah. Herself and I were just talking about my man Conan. What a howler of a movie that was. I read all the Robert E. Howard “Conan” books and more than a few of the L. Sprague de Camp versions, as well as the Marvel comics by Roy Thomas and John Buscema.
Frank Frazetta’s take on the character was excellent.
Meanwhile, I’ve been looking into moving the blog over to Medium or Substack, but I’m having a hard time getting excited about either of ’em. Looks like a fair amount of work and then that ol’ sumbitch Al Gorithm takes a hand. Who knows what rough beast might come slouching toward our little clubhouse over there? The devil you know, etc.
I believe we have to create a profile on Substack in order to partake. That means loasswod, login, potential hacking . Uhhgh. If Substack is best for you I’ll go there.
password^^ I didn’t see the change when I was typing but who knows. I got a “duplicate” message, too.
Oh, yeah, sheesh, right … I completely overlooked that aspect of our relationship. I don’t really wanna go there anyway, in part because I’d have to build up another identity online, and in part because I’m not interested in newsletters, monetization, and all the rest of the bells and whistles that Medium and Substack want to sell me.
It just annoys me that WordPress keeps whittling away at the simplicity of blogging. The themes they offer now are Squarespace-style marketing whizbangs that don’t seem to take much interest in, y’know, like, writing, an’ stuff.