Blogger problems Blogger problems

Blogger is somehow screwed up right now, and they don't seem to be doing anything to fix the problem.

Maybe a week ago, my blog here was identified as potentially spam. I haven't the foggiest what I did this time. Maybe my new look and feel triggered something. Last time this happened, I was posting an awful lot of stuff. That was when I was trying to post all of the articles and comments coming out on the Sony DRM Rootkit scandal last December. This time, I don't have the foggiest idea of what I did to trigger this.

Nevertheless, Blogger's response to thinking that you are blogging spam is to turn on Word Verification for posts to your own blog. That is inconvenient, but I have Word Verification turned on for my comments because they were getting spammed a month or so ago, and am in the habit of having to enter the often unreadable nonsense characters a couple of times before I get it right when posting over at Althouse.

Nevertheless, I have requested that Blogger remove Word Verification from my post three times now, to no avail. Last December, when this happened, it took maybe an hour. This time, it has been a week, without any response to those requests.

The problem is that Blogger has a feature called "Respond to this Article" that you can easily invoke. It works by opening a post that is linked to that article you want to comment upon. Very slick, and I use it a number of times a day. Indeed, a majority of my posts are of this type. Or at least were.

The problem with that is that it isn't tied into the Word Verification functionality that has been turned on with my normal posts. The result is that when I go to save or post my "Respond to this Article" posts, instead of the post being saved or posted, it is discarded, and I get a blank posting screen, so I can just do the same again. Invariably, I end up backing up (possible only because I have Mouse Gestures installed in Mozilla), and copying all the information from that posting template into a regular Blogger posting template, mastering Word Verification there, and saving or posting, as desired. In short, twice the work.

Needless to say, I have filed two trouble reports with Blogger about this, and have received one automated response with irrelevant suggestions for how to fix my problem. As suggested, I have responded to that with another rendidion of the problem.

This may be the result of a business plan that does not charge its customers. Customer service is almost non-existant here, with my only response over a week from three requests to remove Word Verification and two trouble reports being that automatically generated response with the wildly irrelevant suggestions.

Blogger, if you ever do read any of this - I would be willing to pay to get customer service.