Stumbled upon a new Blogger issue today. I’d rolled out a few posts and my friend Heidee wanted to post a comment. Alas, she could not, because she could not find the word verification input box.

Here is the screenshot she sent:

As you can see, the verification word is visible but the rest of the comment box seems cut off.

I tried to duplicate her issue, but since I was logged in to Blogger, I was not asked for word verification. I logged out and tried commenting on my own blog, and was able to duplicate her issue on Firefox and IE. (My friend tried it in Safari as well and it’s broken as well.)

The cause of the issue is all too clear. Blogger is now showing a preview comment before the verification box, where before it was not. It seems that whomever approved this change did not test it out on the embedded-below-post comment forms, or failed to consider to increase the height of the pop-up word verification form, so that the input field is now inaccessible.

I thought to scour the web for a quick fix, but the issue seems fairly new. I found posts documenting the issue on Blogger Help here and here, logged July 10, 2009. So I doubt there’s already a fix. And since this is a Blogger issue, editing my template won’t help.

For now, I have disabled word verification on my comments. It makes me vulnerable to spam, but I have no other choice. If I revert to the default pop-up window comment form placement, my template might get messed up because I edited it before to get the embedded comment form to work.

For others encountering the same issue, you can do what I did, disable word verification. And if your blog is inundated with spam, then turn on comment moderation. The alternative is to switch from embedded comment form placement to full-page or pop-up comment form placement.

Hopefully Blogger fixes this issue fast.

P.S. Thanks for the heads up, Heids!

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