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Ghostery for Firefox blocks commenting in Blogger.
This has been true for a while and is still an issue for 2.5.3.
Blogger blogs can allow comments in 3 different ways. One way shows comments on the post-page for each post, directly following the blog post and followed by a commenting window for a new comment. It is this window that is blocked by Ghostery.
As a Ghostery user who understands that Ghostery blocks this commenting window, this is trivial. I can disable Ghostery or use a different browser to leave comments if I want to.
But as a blogger who has many readers, this is an issue. I can't tell my readers what browser to use or not to use Ghostery or how to configure things (and I don't want to!). The fact is that Ghostery is a barrier between me and my readers who might want to interact with my blog.
I suppose that Blogger is using some technology for comments (in this mode) that Ghostery blocks. I suppose that the folks at Ghostery will say that the solution is for Blogger to not use that technology. But they do, and I just wish Ghostery did not block comments on blogger blogs.
Ghostery for Firefox blocks commenting in Blogger
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CHAMP
1Hi adams.apples.mail,
Could you include a link to a page on Blogger illustrating this issue?
Blocking is optional in Ghostery, and is something users have to explicitly enable. However, the way Ghostery currently presents "bugs" to users as a flat list is (A) misleading since not all bugs are the same and (B) hard to work with when you want to block some bugs and not others.
We are working on breaking up this flat list into various categories (Advertising, Analytics, Social Widgets, etc.), which will give users better decision-making capabilities with regards to blocking.
The other way your comments might be getting broken by Ghostery's blocking is if Blogger's commenting system is too tightly integrated with some piece of (advertising/analytics) code that Ghostery tracks. If this is the case, we are working on providing surrogate/dummy script functionality with Ghostery that will allow sites like that to continue working even with blocking enabled.
Creating surrogates is a case-by-case effort, which you can help us with by providing specific examples of broken pages. -
Here is a post page from one of my blogs:
http://too-clever-by-half.blogspot.co...
With Ghostery on in Firefox, I cannot comment; the comment window does not show.
This is true of all pages on this blog and I think of all Blogger blogs that are configured to show comments inline on the same post-page as the blog post.
It is interesting to me if there is a way to configure Ghostery that does not block these comments. However, I am concerned that this may require my readers to have more sophistication about Ghostery than is realistic.
Do most people fine-tune Ghostery? Or do the install it, turn it on, and forget it?
I understand from your post that this is not a simple problem, but I appreciate your thinking about it. Please let me know if I can provide any more information about things form my end. Adam
Here's the problem as I see it. User downloads Ghostery, pokes around in the Options, blocks everything (why not?). Seems like this might be normal behavior for many people.
Sometime later, that user finds he or she can't leave a comment on a blog. Multiply that by your user base and that's a lot of people, potentially, who can't interact with my blog. Ouch!
I do appreciate understanding which mechanism of which add-in might do this to my readers (thanks to both of you), but my knowing it does not resolve the issue, unfortunately.
So I hope Alexei and others at Ghostery will continue to think about this problem. Maybe there is something that you can do.
If you do a View Source, you'll see they're not just using the Google Friend Connect API, but the OpenSocial Gadgets API as well.
You could use the GhostRank data to determine what subset you'd actually need to implement in a surrogate, but you're probably not going to like what you find.
Adam: Exactly! See the first part of my original response for how we plan to address this situation. Once the various comments/social widgets have gotten explained better and separated from other "bugs" in Ghostery's options, Ghostery users should become less likely to block everything, or get surprised by missing comments forms.