Thursday, December 24, 2009

Not exactly getting in the Christmas spirit

The Internet gremlins are still poking fun at me, even now that I have shelled out cash for "unfettered access".

I am finding it next to impossible to leave comments on Blogspot blogs. For some reason (I suppose I may try going to one of the Help forums to see if I can get an answer on this), the 'comments' form is still refusing to load in Firefox (I had thought this recently emerged problem was a side-effect of having to use Tor as my proxy, but evidently not). Even more bizarrely, the only way I can leave comments via Firefox is by clicking on the 'comments' tab for individual posts in the 'Edit Posts' screen of Blogger. Of course, there already has to be at least one comment on a post before this will work; I am precluded from leaving a first comment myself via this route. And why, WHY does this work, when nothing else does?? It's baffling.

And, in Explorer, attempts to leave comments keep getting crashed by those annoyingly nanny-ish 'This site contains both secure and insecure information - are you sure you want to send?' pop-ups. Unless, that is, I am signed in as the Blog administrator - in which case this problem seems to disappear. However, I generally log in to Blogger through Firefox; and Explorer doesn't recognise when I'm logged in through a different browser. And I can't log in separately through the comment form, because of the 'secure/insecure' nonsense again.

So, I have to open Blogger in Explorer, log in..... and then I can visit Blogspot blogs in Explorer, and leave comments as 'Froog'. Why is this so hard?


Oh, oh, there's another wrinkle yet. I had forgotten to log out of Blogger in Firefox. Google/Blogger deemed it 'suspicious activity' that I was trying to access my account in two different browsers (but on the same goddamn computer!) at the same time, and closed my account. It has demanded that I change my password (because, obviously, an 8-letter password is going to be much more secure than a 7-letter password; especially when it's emanating from the same computer as the allegedly 'suspicious' activity!!!). And, since there is no way of communicating with Google/Blogger, I cannot complain about how daft this is. I just hope I'm going to be able to change my password back.... before I forget what the new one is.


Google/Blogger, this is NOT the way to wish someone A Merry Christmas.

2 comments:

JES said...

Aside from the employer's blocking practices which I just described in another comment, it seems that Blogger-based blogs HAVE been behaving weirdly. The problem, in the main, seems to have been with blogs which use Blogger's embedded-comments form. (This "feature" is turned on via a checkbox in the blog's settings.) When the blog admins switch to a non-embedded-comments form, like the pop-up one you use here or like the totally separate comments pages like Moonrat uses, my problems seem to go away.

But yes, in general, this generally does indeed fall into the "Things that are SHITE" category -- something which functions perfectly well in its simplest form gets all tarted up for some "user interface" excuse and suddenly goes to hell.

Froog said...

It seems I'm chasing you up the page, JES. Nice to have you back.

You're probably keeping ahead of me (despite having to read the posts!) because I have beer and e-mail and K.D. Lang going on at the same time.