Long ago, Blogger Support used to provide personalised account recovery service, to blog owners who had forgotten their account names and passwords - and give "hints" in open forum discussion, reminiscent of the popular TV game show, Wheel Of Fortune.
But reality intervened - and now, everybody who wants to recover access to a Blogger account / blog must use one of the automated account / blog access recovery tools- ignoring however defective they may appear to be.
We have seen several sad stories, played out in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue.
Round #1
An unhappy "blog owner" would request assistance. I forgot the password. Can somebody help me recover access?
Blogger Support would email recovery instructions to "whatever @ gmail . com", and advise the "blog owner" I emailed your reset instructions to "w****** @ g**** . com".
Sometimes they would get the reply That does not help me. Can I buy a vowel?
Blogger Support, always optimistic, would give it another go.I emailed your reset instructions to "w***e*** @ g**** . com".
thenI emailed your reset instructions to "w*a*e*** @ g**** . com".
finallyI emailed your reset instructions to "w*a*e**r @ g**** . com".
Finally, the successful "blog owner" would reply Thank you so much! I am so happyyyyyyyy!!!
But the story did not always end there.
Round #2
The next month somebody would report My blog disappeared from my dashboard while I was in the hospital, in a coma. I now want to tell everybody how I am doing - but my blog is now full of spam, and nobody can read it!! Whatever can the problem be?
And the blog mentioned in Round #2 turned out to be the same as in Round #1.
Round #3
The final verdict would be that Blogger Support, while playing "Wheel of Fortune" in Round #1, had been playing with a hacker, who was then able to steal somebody else's blog.
Bonus Round
After that happened a couple times. Blogger developed the recovery tools, and wrote the final FAQ. And, stopped providing real time, personalised advice.
And that is that. You cannot prove that you are the owner of the blog, because you cannot communicate directly with Blogger Support. You have to use the tools provided - and / or search each email account, persistently.
Blogger Support will not play "Wheel of Fortune" any more. Everybody is urged to never reveal their email address, to the world.
In some cases, the blogs would be deleted, as new spam hosts - but ownership is seldom recoverable. Bankrupt
Your best solution, now, is to start a new blog - then combine the two blogs, in a blog cluster.
Blog owners continue to forget the account name and / or password of their Blogger accounts, then demand alternate recovery options.
Every week, we see the reports in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue, claiming that changing their email - or getting a new phone - caused somebody to unfairly lose access to her / his blog. Too many blog owners refuse to understand that the email address and phone number are simply backdoor accesses to their Blogger accounts.
When given advice to use Blogger: Forgot your username or password?, or Blogger Help: Having trouble signing in or viewing your blog?, we frequently see demurrer.Neither tool helps me. Can I please contact a real person?
The implication, when demanding human real time contact, is that the blog owner (or would be blog thief) can provide secret details - which when supplied, will convince a real Google security employee that the Blogger account / blog is the legal property of the complainant.
Secret details, which are jointly effective for Blogger / Google and the would be blog owner, are quite limited.
Account / blog recovery details have standards, to be useful.
Any account / blog recovery has to be based upon details which have three requirements.
- The would be owner knows, and can use.
- Blogger / Google can verify, within their own databases.
- No third person can discover, using enough search time (Google or competitor) - or manufacture, using PhotoShop or a similar product.
Any details, which do not fulfill all 3 requirements, are either useless or unsafe. If unwisely accepted by Blogger / Google, they simply allow theft of someone else's properly secured Blogger account and blogs.
Verification can only use Blogger / Google maintained details.
Verification has to be based on Blogger / Google databases. Blogger cannot accept FaceBoook, Twitter, or WordPress personal pages or profiles, as proof of identity or ownership.
Blogger has a responsibility to active blog owners, to not permit theft.
Many complainants claim that Blogger is being unfair, in denying them access to their blogs. They overlook the fact that unwisely accepting publicly known or unverifiable details, as proof of blog ownership / identity, would be unfair to the millions of blog owners, who remember their login details - and are actively maintaining and publishing their blogs.
The purpose of account recovery is not to simply allow every blog owner access to their blogs, even if they casually neglected to remember required identification tokens (account name, email address, password, etc.). The purpose is to allow as many blog owners as possible access to their blogs - while preventing malicious blog theft by hackers able to misuse the provided recovery tools.
Active blog owners want their blogs to remain theirs.
People who carefully maintain access to their accounts and blogs do so, based on the presumption that Blogger / Google will not unwisely give someone else access. These people appreciate the Blogger promise that our blogs will remain ours, forever - as long as we exercise common sense and courtesy.
The many blog owners, who maintain both front door and back door access - and actively maintain and publish their blogs - do not really care about the few who need "their" long dormant blogs recovered - or who want to delete "their" blogs, so they can move their activity to FaceBook or WordPress. They appreciate that Blogger will not give up login details, without observing appropriate caution.
Thanks to a recent decision by the European Courts, many people are claiming the right to delete their blogs, and to have the search engines stop indexing their blogs.
Some people believe that this newly defined right entitles them to recover control of their blogs, published long ago, with access (account name and password) long forgotten. A few such people even have blogs owned by "legacy" Blogger accounts, never converted to Blogger / Google accounts.
Nobody has the right to unilaterally take control of a blog that may belong to somebody else. If you cannot prove yourself to be the owner of a given blog, Blogger Support should not provide to you control of that blog. Whether you want to delete a blog, or to change the content, you have to prove ownership of the blog.
So called "legacy" blogs are a concern, because even Blogger Support cannot authoritatively identify all "legacy" accounts. All that they can say isIf your blog was created before 2007, you may have a "legacy" Blogger account.
More properly, since some blogs were converted transparently (without realisation of the owner), they should sayIf your blog was created before 2007, and never converted, you may have a "legacy" Blogger account.
The "legacy" account conversion took many years - and everybody was given many months of warning, to get their accounts converted. This was not an overnight process.
All that you can do is to try to convert your Blogger account, and see if you get control of your long forgotten blog. Even if converted, though, you have to be able to prove ownership of the account, once it's been converted - just as you have to prove ownership of any Blogger account.
Too many people try to steal ownership of someone else's blog, by claiming to own the blog - but conveniently forgot the account name or password.
Since there are more people working on their blogs (maybe not today, but sometime in the past), than are trying to recover control, people trying to recover control (or to steal someone else's blog), are going to get less support.
The term "actively working on their blog" implies no specific activity level. A blog, published once, 10 years ago, is just as valid as one published once daily for 10 years.
Blogger blog owners are entitled to the same courtesy and security - as long as each blog owner acts responsibly, and remembers the account name and password of an owning Blogger account. Similarly, blog owners are entitled to Blogger not providing clues, to blog thieves, that could assist in blog theft.
If Blogger / Google does not agree with your claim, and if you believe in the right to be forgotten, you hire a lawyer, and get a court order. Let the courts decide your special rights.
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Whether you give up your blog willingly, have your blog stolen from you, or accidentally enable your blog to be stolen - once your blog is in someone else's control, Blogger cannot, legally, help you.
We see the naivete, periodically, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken.I made my friend an administrator of my blog, and he changed me to an author. Can Blogger restore my ownership?
And the short answer, too frequently given, is denial.No, Blogger cannot help you.
Blogs stolen, supposedly from their rightful owner, can generally not be returned by Blogger.
There are various ways to lose control of a blog.
In any case, once control passes to another person, it's unlikely that Blogger can, unilaterally, restore ownership.
Blog thieves are very persuasive - and masquerade as theft victims.
One problem here is that too many would be blog thieves start their tales with just these claims. Long ago, Blogger Support would, obediently, "restore" ownership, when requested - and we would later see the angry forum report.
How did this other person get control of my blog?
Blogger Support would research the second "theft" report - and realise, too late, that they had previously enabled the theft.
Blog owners enable some thefts, with security mistakes and requests.
Also, if you neglect to remember your account name or password, please don't just setup a new account, then suggest that Blogger transfer control of the blog, to the new account. This suggestion, also, has been used to make Blogger an unwitting accomplice in too many thefts.
Blog owners must assume some responsibility for problems.
The bottom line here is that you have to accept full responsibility, for retaining control of your Blogger account and blogs.
Even if your friends account is hacked, then used to attack yours, don't expect assistance from Blogger / Google. And please understand that blog security review won't happen, immediately.
Almost daily, we see a confused query in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is BrokenI lost ownership access to my blog. Can Blogger restore my access?
Not every blog owner realises that the Permissions wizard has a safeguard, ensuring that every blog will always have at least one administrator. Anybody who is the former owner is now a member of a team blog - and at least one other team member is an administrator.
The ownership transfer process involves 4 steps, out of necessity.
- Invite a new member (if necessary).
- Wait while the new member accepts the invitation (again, if necessary).
- Make the new member an administrator.
- Remove the old administrator (if necessary).
Each step can be executed immediately, or with any amount of elapsed time after the previous step, at your convenience.
Look at the Permissions wizard for your blog, some time. If you are the only administrator, you will see your name, with no ability to delete or demote yourself.
A team blog will have author status selectors.
If you own a team blog, you'll have a selector for each of the team members who are authors, allowing that member to be promoted to administrator status.
A team blog with multiple administrators will have administrator status selectors.
If the team blog has at least 2 administrators, each administrator will have a selector, allowing any administrator to delete or demote any administrator. As an administrator demotes any administrator to an author, the entry for that new author will have the ability for that author to be again promoted to administrator.
A blog with only one administrator will have no administrator status selector.
Whenever you are the only administrator, your member entry will have no ability to delete or demote. This prevents you from having a blog with no administrator.
Of course, as noted elsewhere, when the blog has at least 2 administrators, any administrator can be deleted or demoted at the decision of any other administrator. Also, team status is not checked when accounts are deleted.
If you are demoted, only an administrator can promote you.
The bottom line here is, if you suddenly find yourself without administrative access to your blog, the advice that you will get will be to
Ask one of the blog administrators to restore your status.
To prevent blog theft, only another administrator can restore your status.
Long ago, Blogger blogs had a very simple membership permissions policy.
Each blog had an owner, and members. The owner was the administrator of the blog, and ownership could not be transferred.
This simple policy was a problem, because some blog owners would eventually lose interest in a blog, and want to cede ownership to someone else. In other cases, people were known to die suddenly, leaving blogs with no live owners. In both cases, Blogger Support would become involved, and would manually transfer ownership.
Later, Blogger developed the Permissions wizard, and added a class of member called "Administrator". The original publisher of a blog becomes the first administrator, who may, at his / her discretion, designate additional administrators.
The ability to designate an "Administrator" solved the problem of nontransferable ownership, but introduced a second problem.
Any administrator could, at her / his discretion again, remove him / herself (or any other administrator) from the administrators list.
Initially, this improvement created two problems.
- Some bloggers managed to remove all administrators from the list, creating blogs with no administrators.
- Some bloggers, newly made administrator, would inappropriately remove other bloggers (including the original administrator aka "owner") from administrative status.
Blogger fixed the first problem, by adding a safeguard - making the Permissions wizard check for the presence of other administrators in the membership list, before removing administrator permission from any one member. However, there remain two problems, now.
- The safeguard works only if you can guarantee that all administrators can perform as administrators.
- This policy works only if you can guarantee that all administrators will perform honourably.
If blog membership is to be fully transferrable, all administrators to a blog have to have equal status. If you have an "owner" class of administrator, and a suddenly dead owner, you have a blog with no active owner. Or, you have blogs with non transferrable ownership status.
Right now, anybody who is a blog administrator is a blog owner. If you make someone an administrator, and that person removes you (and any other administrators) from administrator status, that person becomes the blog owner.
If you have an administrator who dies, you do not prune the administrator list, and you are able to remove yourself from administrator status, you may end up with a blog with no live owner.
The administrator(s) / owner - whoever she / he may be - has the right to decide over disposition of comments and posts - and of who to make a member, and to make an administrator. Blogger cannot, legally, "restore" anybody's previous rights.
If the "owner" deleted the blog, it's going to remain deleted. Contributors, and former "owners", have no say in the matter. If deleted content must be recovered, it may be possible to do this on a page by page (post by post) basis - possibly from blog cache or a blog posts newsfeed.
Possession is the law, for Blogger blogs. If you gave up control (voluntarily or even involuntarily), it's not your blog.
