Let Me Help You Help Me

Sometimes people need a little public service announcement, I think. Jenna wrote a passionate post (read it and you’ll see that the word “passionate” is actually a pretty mild term for the post) about the word verification/anti-spam thing that pops up on many blogs when you comment. You know, that thing that makes you type in “sid09df” before your comment goes through. Except you can never tell if it is an “O” or a “0” and you end up typing in random combination after random combination.

I had turned mine off a year or so ago and gotten two spam comments within the day, so I turned it back on. But, fearing for my life after her post, I decided I’d give it a shot, and what do you know? No spam in the three months since then.

So here’s my plea for today. If you use Blogger, and I know many many of you do, I’d like to kindly suggest that you set your profile to show your email address so that when you comment on a Blogger blog, the writer can respond back. If you don’t have this set, when I get your comment via email and go to respond, it looks like this. I’m guessing your email is not “noreply-comment@blogger.com.” Unless somehow dozens of you signed up for the same email address.

And because I care so deeply, here’s how to do it. It is incredibly easy (we’re talking two minutes, tops) and then I will be able to respond when you ask things like, “What book should I read?” (Answer: The Hunger Games).

Also, even if you DON’T have a Blogger blog, many of you still have Blogger profiles so that you can comment, so it’d be very very lovely if you could do this to your profile too.

Anyway, without further ado:

Step 1: Go to Blogger.com, sign in, and ta-da, there is your dashboard. Click “Edit Profile” (for your convenience, I’ve drawn a very impressive red arrow pointing to it with Paint. Because I am a high-tech blogger).

The “Edit Profile” Page will open. Two things to do on this page. First, check the box that says “Show my email address.” And then, if you scroll down a bit more, you’ll see a box labeled “email address.” Enter the email address you’d like people to respond to in that box. Please.

Then, scroll to the very bottom of that page and click the big orange “SAVE PROFILE” button.

That’s it! So easy!

And I will love you forever because I’ll be able to respond when you ask a question or if I want to ask YOU a question or just say “yes, yes, I love that book too and we should be friends.” And believe me, if you have your email address set to display, we will be friends.