I’ve had a number of posts from people who post as “anonymous,” presumably because they haven’t filled in their names (and often not an email address, either, though that never appears to other commenters). This may be a WordPress problem, but I think that it’s simply because people post hastily or expect autofill to fill in their information when it doesn’t.
Sadly, the autofill feature seems to have gone kaput for many people, and I cannot get WordPress to fix it. I think you can fix it by registering for a WordPress account on WordPress.com (you don’t need to have a website to do that), but I’ve heard that some people don’t want to do that.
For the time being, I am going to stop posting comments that are “anonymous”, and ask you to fill in your name or whatever pseudonym you want. The reason, of course, is that an identity, real or not, should be attached to every comment so that readers and I can follow a single person’s comments. If you use “Anonymous” (which automatically appears if you don’t put in a name), readers and I can’t tell one Anonymous from another.
So please, even if it’s a bit onerous, fill in your name and an email address for every comment you make if it’s not autofilled. This really shouldn’t take much time.
If tech-savvy readers want to give hints or the like, be my guest. 
Regarding the “WordPress account” proposed solution… I don’t think this will help much, at least it hasn’t for me. I’ve had this kind of account for years now but sometimes I just get “forgotten” by WP. There seems to be no particular pattern to it. I might go for months with no trouble at all only to be confronted with repeated demands that I log in after having been forgotten. I’ve no idea what causes this but suspect that sunspots or perhaps witchcraft may be involved.
Now that you mention it, I do recall having that happen to me too, once in a great while. But that seems also true for other web sites.
I wonder if other WP sites are experiencing a similar problem?
The problem, at least for me, with WordPress is that I have to go there and log in each time I open the browser for it to remember who I am when I come here. As soon as I close the browser it seems to forget me. So it doesn’t really save any time over just trying to remember my name when I get here 🙂
For me, it automatically logs me in the moment I go onto the WEIT page. This works both in Firefox and Safari. I am not computer savvy enough to know why, but i can see how that would be a negative.
I’ll keep playing, maybe I’ll reach that happy place 🙂
When I am logged in it digs out my google account pic as an avatar. Somehow I find this a little disturbing, it will probably start telling me the time it will take me to get home soon.
I gave it a little more info and now it seems to log me in automatically, even after rebooting. Which is actually an improvement. No pain no gain I guess.
I have a WP account and have had no trouble staying logged in. I think there have been situations where I have been logged out but they are rare and it is easy to log back in, especially if you use a browser that keeps track of logins and passwords.
However, a word to the wise. Don’t reuse passwords! Every website has some vulnerability to being hacked, regardless of how good they say their security is. If they get hacked and your password stolen, you don’t want the hackers to have the keys to your entire realm. A WordPress account is a good example. Unless you have a website under WP, having your WP password hacked should be no big deal. WP remedies their security issue and you give it a new password.
Keeping track of passwords is a real pain. I have 142 of them! I keep them in an Excel spreadsheet that is protected by a single password that is relatively easy for me to remember but hard for anyone else to guess. I’m sure there are other ways to do this that will work.
I use Apple’s password manager for this. I have no idea what most of my passwords are because they are long and obscure auto-generated strings.
The auto-generated obscure passwords are the ultimate in unguessability but a pain when you have to re-type a password, which is often enough unfortunately. I use my own scheme involving words that have no special meaning to me (ie, not my pet names, etc.) and special characters ($, #, digits). Not as secure but secure enough (I hope).
The password manager takes care of it. I never type a password in anymore. On the rare occasions when I need it, I can go do a copy/paste.
IOW, it is kind of like what you do except easier and more secure.
Yes, I also copy/paste but some sites and apps disable copy and/or paste. Also, there are many things which do not support copy/paste like TVs, set-top boxes, etc. Speaking of copy/paste, I recommend an app called Pushbullet (pushbullet.com) which allows me to easily copy/paste between my Android phone and Windows desktop, and Chrome. It also supports other kinds of devices and browsers too. Operating systems are starting to supply this kind of functionality also but a platform-neutral solution like PB covers more bases without favoring a particular OS.
I’m blissfully free of daily contact with Windows and Android. 😉
In my career in computer software I’ve worked with all the major operating systems. I was a Mac user for a decade. They all have their pros and cons. Apple will tell you that they have the best security … until they don’t. They will tell you their computers are the easiest to use. That might have been true in the Mac’s early days but no longer. It is mostly a matter of what you get used to and how exactly you evaluate them. A lot of pro Mac arguments boil down to a claim that only a Mac works like a Mac. Hard to argue with that. That all said, may your state of bliss continue.
In my career in software development I’ve done the same. As I near the end of said career, I’m happy to not need to deal with ‘doze. (I am not ignorant of those environments and have worked on both, and *nix.)
(To be fair, I am stretching the truth just a bit. I have both systems on my desk, but the Windows system does nothing but run my security camera software and avoid a lot of computer BS in my personal and remaining work-lives.)
I am happy with Last Pass, which works with every browser. It also has an autofill feature.
I was a Mac-only guy, right from the get-go (was that 1985?). I never bought a computer until 1994 (Mac laptop).
Then came Windows 95. It wasn’t great (but then neither was Mac OS at that time). But I found them roughly equivalent. My work was all Windows 95. The software I mainly used was all on Win95 (some wasn’t available on Mac).
I switched and never went back. I like Win7 very well indeed.
Some of the things that bug me about Macs nowadays:
1. The UI in individual SW programs (e.g. Word, Excel) varies drastically from Win to Mac (mainly, where to find that function you need) I’m a pretty strong user in Win; pretty useless in Mac, when my wife needs help. (This is probably a MS issue; but nevertheless it’s real.)
2. The ghost of Steve Jobs. No delete key (he insisted on calling backspace “delete”), no arrow keys, one-button mouse, etc., etc. Some of the Apple design is brilliant. Some, not so much.
3. It’s “easy”. Well, yeah, if you are doing really simple things. If you wish for more control (I want to paddle a tiny play-kayak with sharp edges in Cl 4+, not a flat-bottomed tub on a pond) I find it infuriating. Jobs has placed these handrails here for your own good. This is likely my inexperience; but it all seems mighty opaque to me.
[stepping off soap box]
May your bliss continue.
Oy.
It’s your fault for starting it GBJ. 😉
Some comments on your Mac nits:
1. This bugs me too. I suspect this is due to app makers favoring symbiosis with each platform over a uniform cross-platform UI as most users work on a single platform only.
2. Steve Jobs was well-known for his pig-headedness. I attended the roll-out of the NeXT computer. Jobs spoke to the crowd as lunch was served, fielding questions. Many in the crowd were software developers, me included, and wanted to know how they were going to deliver their product to customers if the device didn’t have any kind of floppy drive. Its only removable storage media was an MHD drive where the disks cost ~$50 each. Jobs clearly had no answer and mumbled something about there needing to be some kind of disk exchange program. This prompted the obvious next question, “Is NeXT going to set that up?” Jobs got frustrated, said that the waiters were making too much noise, and left the podium.
3. I agree. My biggest complaint about both Windows and Mac OSs is that they don’t smoothly integrate the point-and-click, easy UI with the underlying powerful OS. IMHO, their easy UIs break a fundamental principle of UI design by presenting a UI that imperfectly hides the underlying OS structure and capabilities by presenting a simplified, but wrong, model.
Win 7 has been stable, fast, and flexible for me. Everything runs, nothing crashes.
I am able to expand my HDD storage at home, on my own, with nothing more than a ESD wrist strap and a screw driver. (1TB to 8TB.) I replaced the OS disc with a 0.5TB SSD. All for about $300 and about 2 hours’ labor including formatting the discs, etc.
I won’t call it bliss; but, based on my experience with my wife’s Macs, I have no interest in switching.
I am pleased that you are pleased with your Mac(s). As I typically say, À chacun son goût.
I would be curious to hear a listing of what a Mac user feels are the advantages of Mac vs. Win7 or Win10 (aside from lower security risk, which almost inevitable given the delta in sales/users).
I am genuinely curious. My experience with Macs in the last 10 years hasn’t been good.
–Cheers!
As much as I resisted wading into this conversation, I can give my perspectives to this particular question. I work in IT and I use both Macs and PCs and can move between them relatively easily. I also have used Linux and Unix systems. I prefer Macs because I tend to like the OS much better.
1) I find it difficult to find simple functions in Windows 10 – easy things that are in the Settings for my Mac, seem to be buried deeply in Windows 10. I often just use the search function or make a shortcut to deal with this.
2) The Unix underlying system. I find it so easy to do things with Unix and many apps take advantage of this – for example, I use an app (free/donation ware) called Carbon Copy Cloner. You can clone your drive to a bootable external drive in a couple mouse clicks then set it to back up regularly. The learning curve is low and you can even set it to do this same task regularly or on a trigger (like connecting an external drive).
3) Ease of connectivity – I never fight with monitors when I connect with them where I often fight with my Windows machine connecting (though it is better than it was when using previous versions of Windows). Mac OS also lets me easily connect to a second Mac via a cable to boot into “target disk mode” and copy files or transfer OS stuff.
4)No dlls & weird executables – just cleaner and easy to install. It’s an ass pain if forgotten files start clogging up the works but I have a program to clean that up and I never need to run it save for maybe once every few years.
5) Running apps off mountable disks – you can run whole apps this way.
6) The ecosystem – I can handoff my browser on my iPhone to my browser on my Mac and continue reading that web site. I can copy something on my Mac and paste it on my iPhone. I can unlock my MacBook Air with my Apple Watch.
7) I just really like the OS. I find it clean and simple and it doesn’t bog down at least not without, in my experience, a hardware failure like bad RAM or disk drive failures (I had a stupid hard drive die in my RAID & it corrupted my OS – thankfully fixing it was as simple as booting into a backup and restoring (see point 2).
I think those are the main reasons I have.
Let me say this too: My wife prevailed upon me to get “smart” phones in 2015. Yes, I am a (very) late adopter.*
We went for iPhones. (Mine is an iPhone 6+: I wanted the biggest (reasonable) screen as my close vision continues to degrade!) I think Apple really nailed the design on the iPhone. I keep discovering cool things about the design.
This was my first foray into an i-thingy of any sort; and it’s been pretty good.
(* I saw too many people with surgically-attached phones. Looked like a huge time-waster. Not for me; but for my wife. Turns out not so much — she only turns hers on when she wants to make an outbound call! (Kind of negates some of its purpose …) But she does spend far too much time on the computer. I knew FB was going to be a mistake. And it has been. But not for me, I treat it like my home email: Look at it for 5-10 minutes per day, then shut it off.)
Microsoft ended mainstream support for Windows 7 in January 2015. Next year you’ll get no more security updates. You’re not keeping up with the times, Mr. Billie!
I’m not all that interested in OS wars but Apple has provided a wide range of products that all work rather seamlessly together. And while the company is far from perfect, they have taken user security far more seriously and for for a longer time than Microsoft and Google. (To say nothing of FaceBook!) There are fewer hassles in the ecosystem because a single company has been able to manage integration between miscellaneous devices.
For some people the lack of a Delete key on a default keyboard is a showstopper. It isn’t an issue for me. (I use a Logitech solar-powered keyboard with all the keys I need, and more.)
(I appreciate hardware hacking. I built my own ‘doze machine for running my video cameras. But there’s no way I would put up with the hassle of integrating that OS with my phone, tablet, etc. I’d rather use stuff that “just works”.)
I am quite sincere in asking for (and being very open to hear) the advantages of a Mac vs. Win7/Win10.
I don’t use Win10. It will be forced upon me at work soon however.
I do work in my wife’s Macs with some regularity. I am somewhat familiar with OS10 and the typical SW on a Mac.
(I think much of the frustration both kinds of users feel on crossing the border is: The differences in the UI layout and logic, which shoves one back down the learning curve in a discontinuous way.)
Yes. One of the things that I found in going back and forth, as well as designing software to run on both platforms, it seems as if Apple and Microsoft approached each feature or challenge by looking at what the other did and then doing the opposite. This is the result of wanting to provide the same functionality but not be accused of copying or sued for patent infringement. Sometimes they are simply trying to leapfrog the competition.
“You’re not keeping up with the times, Mr. Billie!”
Yes, I don’t like this aspect of MS. And I don’t keep up. More shortly, I think.
Having worked in a HW/SW company I totally understand why Microsoft no longer supports Windows 7. It’s just too expensive to test every new thing on a plethora of operation systems and guard against viruses, etc. People often think there is a sinister reason to do this but it’s just not feasible to keep the support up.
Yes, I agree. Furthermore, customers should understand there’s a trade-off. They could keep maintaining old versions of the OS but they would have to pass this cost on to the consumer.
There’s a similar trade-off involved in dealing with bugs. People are amazed that software ships with known bugs. After all, if the company knows about the bug, why don’t they fix it? It’s purely economics. I used to tell them the trade-off would be made differently if we were making space shuttle software but the price would be much higher.
Plus you’d never get the software to market before requirements/needs changed and companies are pretty transparent about their KIL and the decisions to release with certain bugs is considered.
Actually, Microsoft does a much better job of keeping backwards compatibility than Apple. In general, Microsoft doesn’t ever eliminate support for APIs whereas Apple does it all the time. We were constantly being forced to “upgrade” our application because Apple chose to turn off some API in their latest OS version. I suspect that this is because Apple makes so much off selling hardware. They want everyone to have to upgrade regularly.
Thanks for the replies, GB and Diana.
Interesting stuff to chew on.
I’m not interested in OS wars either.
I think I’m just much what one is used to.
I find that the MS products (which is much of what I use) work quite well together.
I use Adobe products but won’t upgrade now because they won’t sell me SW anymore, only rent it (pretty steeply, IMO).
I use some music SW, and some statistical SW, labview and such.
Paul… you’re confusing the life of a developer with the life of a user. Speaking as a user, I don’t care that much about how hard it is for you to keep your software “up to snuff” with the changing platform. Your pain is my gain. Software that evolves with the platform generally improves over time.
Speaking as (a kind of) a developer, it doesn’t bother me much, either. Our company does custom software development, so it is our clients who need to decide whether to keep their software “up to snuff”. 😉
Yeah you would care if you had to pay for that pleasure (of keeping old software). It’s astronomical what is involved testing old stuff – dedicated teams of people who cost a lot of money as well as software delays as all devices need to be tested and signed off on. It just results in piss poor customer service in the end.
Oh and I mean – it costs money that would be passed down to the consumer. Moreover, the company suffers a huge reputation hit if their old software is at the heart of a phishing or virus attack. Time and money spent on supporting really old stuff is time and money not spent on innovation.
No, I am a user as well as a developer. Two things:
1. The fact that Microsoft supporters their APIs much longer allows old programs to run. There are many old programs that are no longer maintained and they still run 20 years later. This means you don’t have to run out and buy another program that probably costs more and doesn’t do the job.
2. Even when talking about major apps, the constant change to APIs means you are forced to upgrade. Software companies may like that as it forces its customers to pay more.
In general, what helps or hurts developers also helps or hurts end users, as with most economic relationships.
Well, I don’t think that’s quite right, Paul, at least not as you’re framing it.
Apple customers are notoriously fond of their computers (iPhones, etc.) There is a reason for this.
There are precious few people who are interested in running 20 year old software and maintaining the ability to do so comes at a steep price, as Diana has pointed out.
Most folk care about how easily they can accomplish something and how much effort goes into learning to do something new. They care about how hard it is to upgrade from an old machine to a new one. They care about how well different types of device work with one another. And they care about the aesthetics of the kit they buy.
The travails of a developer working to keep his software in sync with changes on the platform are exceedingly low on nearly everyone’s priority list.
I don’t buy into the ease-of-use argument with Macs. I think they once were much easier to use than the PC competition but that ship sailed long ago. Of course, Apple still beats that drum. Most of their customers never experience anything different or, if they do, it doesn’t work like a Mac so they give up right away. It’s a sort of self-fulfilling marketing principle.
I find them very much easier to use than a PC – my example is doing a full system back up of a bootable drive. Macs make that easy to do without technical knowledge. Sure there are the Windows restore points but I’m talking about an entire bootable copy that you can carry on another small drive. It also makes it easier to put all your data on an external drive. Connecting to projectors are also easier – no fighting with resolution.
At best, Paul, you’re comparing two computer OS experiences. To each his own. But you’re missing the point, I think. Apple’s “ecosystem” is much broader than Microsoft’s. They, therefore, are able to integrate a broader range of devices smoothly.
I’m not here to sell you a Mac. But I’ve been listening to folk like you make this same argument since I was was a young man back in the Dark Ages. You don’t get why Apple is the success it is. /Shrug.
Me neither. I have no ideas what most of my passwords are. I either use the Apple password generator in my keychain or I use 1Password.
“… or I use 1Password.”
And what would your username be? 😉
-Ryan
haha.
Paul:
Plus you use a WordPress integrated GRAVATAR – which helps I think.
Yes, you’re right.
I agree passwords are a pain. Which is why, for WEIT, it’s actually easier for me to fill in ‘nym and email address each time (Firefox conveniently prompts when I hit the initial letter of each)
cr
….I comment fairly rarely, but when I do I am usually logged in to WP… at least that’s the information presented when I hit the reply link….”Logged in as lordcrankleton. Log out?”… It always autofills for me on my laptop running Windoze and Chrome, and my phone, running Android and Chrome….
The delete cookies post from a couple days ago didn’t work, but today, the autofill is working for me. Go figure.
Did not work for me either.
Started working.
Then stopped.
Yup…I just posted a RWP comment and the autofill didn’t work. Came back here and with this comment it didn’t work either. Oh well, I have a short name and my email autofills once I type the first letter.
Yeah … mine stopped doing that too.
I always get a WordPress Login prompt before a comment will be accepted. The same anonymous phenomenon is happening over at the Sensuous Curmudgeon, also a WP site.
I have used a GRAVATAR for a few years & I’m convinced it’s saved me from these hassles. This is a GRAVATAR explained [A Globally Recognized Avatar] – it is integrated into WordPress & you will need a WordPress.com [not .org] account first.
HOW TO SIGN UP FOR AN ACCOUNT/GRAVATAR
NOTES:
I tested getting a WordPress.com account yesterday in a new browser with a new email address [because I already have an account].
I managed to open a 2nd new WordPress.com account without getting stuck with a WordPress site. When I got to the page asking what sort of site I wanted I just went back a page & I had an account. You’ll get an email asking for confirmation as per usual. I couldn’t see a place in the signup process that explicitly permitted me to get an account without a site, hence the above ‘hack’, but that could be me not seeing it!
Gravitar doesn’t protect me from the failures. (I’ve had it as long as I’ve had my WP account… got them at the same time.)
Ok, thanks. That is on a Mac with Safari?
Yes.
It has been so long I am not sure exactly how I am logged in to WordPress. I do have a WordPress account, without a website. I’ve had it for years. I may have used Gravatar to sign up for the WP account or perhaps my Google identity. I have used Gravatar for quite a few years. That picture follows me around everywhere.
In any case, I have only very rarely had log-in issues here at WEIT. Late last year there was a period of a few days where I couldn’t post as myself here at WEIT. I am almost sure it was a WordPress problem because in trying to figure it out I found that other websites at which I use the same identity, but which are not hosted by WP, were trouble free while other sites that were hosted by WP exhibited the same problem. It cleared up in a few days. I don’t recall having a similar issue before or since.
Other than that incident, every once in a great while when opening WEIT I am not automatically logged in. When this happens I go directly to WordPress and log in there and the auto-log-in function then works normally again at all WP hosted sites. I’ve experienced similar at other sites and have assumed that the log in software on at least one end, mine or the sites, requires you to log in manually at some interval as a security measure.
3rd party software support is better on Windows & often there is a free version for any application running in Windows OS.
I play a lot of online cash & tournament poker where it’s important to have a means of representing every opponent’s tendencies from how they played in the past. The best stuff is Windows only. It used to be that a lot of engineering software was similarly windows only – I don’t know if that’s different today.
I like the Mac’s user-friendly interconnectivity as mentioned by Diana MacPherson & the convenience of ‘the cloud’ – lose your laptop & the replacement will have files, folders & data just as per the lost device. The windows implementations of these qualities requires a lot of fiddling & knowledge of what’s happening behind the magic curtain.
I think something changed on this site’s commenting protocol in the last month or so.
IIRC in the past I had to fill in my ID the first time I commented on a post, but for subsequent comments I didn’t need to fill in ID – it remembered me. Now I have to fill in ID for every comment.
If the anonymous comments have increased in the last month, this might be the reason.
Yes, I think something did change, but I had a long text chat with the WordPress people and didn’t get any satisfaction. They just said a. join WordPress and b. clear cookies.
I’ll probably go back to them soon with more kvetching.
Sub
We just had a big update on the WordPress that we use for UCL blogs & it is a great example of Hutber’s law – it is a crap improvement! I have spent a lot of Friday afternoons researching & writing our library blog, but now all the formatting is screwed up & the pictures are not the intended size… 🙁
Don’t forget to update all your WP plug-ins, etc. I don’t think that happens automatically and the old ones may be incompatible with your new version of WP.
Can we change current user names to something else for the same email?
I give some hastily contrived reasons:
1. Typing is tedious in large quantities
2. I don’t understand how making a WordPress account directly follows from a website feature getting disabled or rendered buggy
3. Internet connectivity is not always such that typing is do-able
4. A new user name can be made so it is easy to type
Yes. Try it.
This would mean an exception to a Rool
Shall I wait til PCC(E) gives guidance?
You must have read the rule. The rule [rule 4] – tells you what to do in the case of wishing to change your name so why ask me?