After many frustrations in recent months on Blogger, I reached a point where Google’s ‘free’ product simply wasn’t serving me, or my readers, well at all, with particular regard to the commenting function.
In recent months, the notification of new comments on posts ceased, due to an unknown cause, and I had to visit blogger’s admin section and look for posts in a moderation queue. That got old fast.
Then there was an option to ‘upgrade’/switch my blogging identity from ‘blogger’ to ‘Google-plus’. I tried this change and discovered it had some curious outcomes:
– it allowed some folks who had been unable to successfully add comments in recent months to post now able to do so – yay!
– I now found comments on posts from months back, submitted by readers via Google Plus, which I had never seen nor received notification about. My apologies to those readers, like Ward in Seattle. I wasn’t ignoring you – I never received any notification, and the comments you made only seemed to exist in the Google Plus universe.
– when a reader comments via Google Plus the post author (me) is NOT given any notification as to whether a comment was left. And this applies to any post on this blog, going back, in this case, some 1020 posts back to 2009. The only way I would discover that someone had left a comment on an old post was by manually scrolling through the summary page for all 1020+ posts, and I’d have to do that on a regular basis. It would be almost a full-time job, and a very boring one at that.
-worst of all, on Google plus, there is no comment moderation, leaving my blog wide open to abusive comment content, x-rated comment content, or just the run-of the mill spam which comes in daily. No way that would work for me, and readers here I’m sure are not looking for that sort of thing either.
– if comments were made by readers with Google Plus, then reader without Google plus would be unable to see them. If i reverted back to ‘blogger’ identity instead of Google Plus, all comments left by google plus readers would be lost.
So, digging in deeper and finding these issues in blogger seem to be more of a feature than a bug, and Google isn’t in any particular hurry to do anything about it, I decided enough was enough, and though it costs me money to have the blog hosted here, at least I have ownership of the content, which is not the case with the Blogger platform, in which Google owns all your content. Whenever the product is free, then you are the product, as they say.
I’m so annoyed at google that I am thinking of canning all my Google accounts, including Youtube, gmail, and stopping using Google as a search engine. We’ll see how far I feel like taking it – for now, I’m happy to be here, and look forward to posting new content. I’ve placed a redirect on my old blogger site, so hopefully you will automatically land here when you visit the old site. Please update your bookmarks accordingly. And thanks for your steady readership! My apologies to all who were inconvenienced/annoyed/puzzled, or simply struggled trying to leave comments previously on blogger. Those problems are now in the past. Onward and upward.
via Tumblr https://davidpires578.tumblr.com/post/174856216784
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