The Real Blogger Status

Earlier this year, Blogger upgraded their dashboard - and eliminated the opening "My blogs" / "Reading List" page . They changed from a dashboard home page, listing all blogs owned by a given Blogger account - to a home page, showing the dashboard for the most recently updated blog. To the dashboard menu for the blog displayed, they added a pulldown blog selector list. If you want the dashboard for a different blog, or need a different important "My blogs" function, you use the selector list.

Blog owners periodically report seeing "their" blog online - but not being able to access Blogger, to control it. It's my blog - but when I login, I'm forced to an older blog, that I don't care about! The person reporting this discrepancy may or may not own the blog in question - and we need to diagnose the reason for the discrepancy . Similar to spam review , we employ a diagnostic technique known as triage. Triage starts with standard diagnoses.

We see many complaints, worded in various ways, about "missing" blogs, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue . My blog is not on my dashboard! or I logged in this morning, and I see Create your blog now You are not an author on any blogs yet ... Help! There are many reasons for these reports - and not all may be what they seem . The causes of "missing" blogs vary widely, from blogs deleted by Blogger (or the owner) to blogs owned under another account (the claimant or a third party). Chances for recovery may vary, similarly.

We've been helping Blogger blog owners deal with spurious fuzzy content classification , for many years. We started out, long ago, with blogs deleted because of spam classification. Later, Blogger added malware classification - and most recently, porn classification ("adult content", with objectionable advertisements). These three classification categories involve fuzzy blog content analysis.

Occasionally, we see concern in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , about the long term effects of Blogger hacking / malware / porn / spam classification or detection. My blog was deleted, because of spurious spam classification - and later restored to service. Did my blog lose search engine reputation, in Google? Any time a blog goes offline, its reputation is affected, to some extent. How much effect a hacking / malware / porn / spam classification or detection has, on any given blog, will vary widely. You might expect to see different penalties, for different offenses .

One Blogger mystery involves the varying periods of blog unavailability, after hacking activity is detected . My blog just disappeared from my dashboard - and no, it's not listed under "Deleted blogs"! When the owner mentions the notice about "suspicious" / "unusual" account activity, or having unlocked the account (by solving a CAPTCHA, receiving a phone message, changing the password) - and is advised to wait "24 to 48 hours" - many ask the obvious. Is "24 to 48 hours" really accurate? In reality, the legendary "24 to 48" hour time period is only a ball park figure - and both Blogger / Google, and the blog owner, contribute to the uncertainty.