The Real Blogger Status

We're seeing a problem with Blogger Hosted Comments - and "Bad Request Error 400", following the use of the comment "Preview" feature. When a blog owner or reader composes a long or important comment, use of the Preview feature is normal. Right now, after hitting "Publish", following a successful Preview, one frequently sees the bad news. Bad Request Error 400 There is a workaround for this annoyance - and it's not difficult to use.

We periodically see hopeful - yet naive - requests from blog owners, in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger , asking about comment moderation improvement. How do I add a disruptive commenter to a killfile list - and never see his/her nonsense ever again, without moderating every comment, being published? This would be a popular feature - if it could be provided, in any way that would achieve results .

Some blog owners see encoded special characters, in Blogger dashboard displays - and do not understand why they are there. I recently noticed that the comments, that I view in my Blogger dashboard page, have like a series of numbers and symbols in some of the comments. This owner is looking at comments, displayed in the Dashboard Comments pages ("Published", "Awaiting moderation", and "Spam"), which right now may contain strange character sequences. The " HTML entity codes " for special characters, like ampersand, apostrophe, and quote marks, are HTML code - that will probably be with us, forever. Blogger blog content (like many other blogs and websites) uses HTML - and those characters have syntactical importance. Using them in blog content, unencoded, causes problems with browser operation.

We see new blog owners ask the obvious question, in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger . How do I help people Follow my blog? There are several tools for community building , or Following - and different people will make different choices, which to use. The choices depend upon the community that any blog serves - and the purposes for following .

Blog owners periodically ask about publicising their blogs, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue . Why do my comments point to my profile - and not directly to my blog? This blog owner just wants to drive traffic straight to the blog.

Blog guests and owners who wish to use OpenID, for posting comments, may need to logout from Blogger, before commenting. It appears that when commenting, someone logged in to Blogger or Google will use the Blogger / Google account for authentication, automatically - instead of an OpenID account - even when preferring to use OpenID, and the blog permits use of OpenID.

Blogger recently simplified private blog access, and removed some of the ambiguity from the membership invitation acceptance process. Previously, an invitation to a private blog involved an email message with several options. Besides the expected invitation to join (using a Blogger / Google account), one might find an option to "preview" the blog, and / or view as a "guest" (without requiring a Blogger / Google account). Both the "guest" and "preview" options caused confusion, for both owners and prospective members.

One source of occasional confusion, seen in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , is about Google+ and the lack of control. We have discussed the lack of commenting moderation options - but that's just a small part of what you don't get. Under Settings, then Posts and comments, I don't have the same choices as shown. This blog owner is used to the array of comment settings, that seem natural, to somebody using Blogger comments.