Periodically, in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I?, we see a naive query.How do I report a person who posts nasty things, in comments, on my blog?
And the unfortunate response here isYou can't report unwanted comments. There is no comment censoring agency.
Blogger considers comments to be protected as freedom of speech. Outside of moderation for spam - which is a collaborative activity - comments are up to you, the blog owner, to treat as you please.
You, the blog owner, may choose what level of authentication to require, from each commenter.- Anyone - includes Anonymous Users
- Registered Users - includes OpenID
- Users with Google Accounts
- Only members of your blog
You, the blog owner, may choose how to moderate each non spam comment.- Moderate before publishing.
- Moderate after publishing.
Those are your choices. Blogger won't censor, nor do they accept reports about, undesirable content.
Since Blogger leaves these decisions to the blog owners, Blogger also won't un censor content. There's no comment review process, similar to spam review, where they re activate comments when properly requested by the would be comment publisher.
If you post comments which are not appreciated by the owners of the blogs where you post your comments, and you end up labeled a spammer, that's your problem which you must bear.
Like blocking specific viewers, blocking specific commenters, who choose to make unwanted comments, will be as productive as a game of Whac-A-Mole. Blogger chooses to not play that game.
Moderate the comments on your blog, because Blogger won't do that for you. Moderate, and help train the filters. Don't moderate, and accept the decisions made by other blog owners.
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Every week, we see the anguishHow do I get user xxxxx blocked from commenting on my blog?
because many people enjoy FaceBook and Twitter, where there is no spam, and no unwanted comments. They think that Blogger comments should be controlled, as social networking like FaceBook and Twitter are controlled.
With FaceBook, each person controls their own Wall, and their own neighbourhood. With Twitter, each person decides exactly who they wish to Follow, and sees tweets from only those folks that they follow. Neither FaceBook or Twitter encourages you to open up your neighbourhood to the world; both allow you to establish each contact, one by one, at your discretion.
With Blogger commenting, you are encouraged to allow anybody - or anybody with a required level of authentication - to comment on your blog. This encourages freedom of speech, and extends your neighbourhood far beyond the walls that you setup with FaceBook and Twitter. Some commenters, and other readers of your blogs, may later become part of your FaceBook and Twitter neighbourhoods - but at their discretion, as well as yours.
With both FaceBook and Twitter, any established account has some implied value, which is a function of the size of its neighbourhood. Nobody can use a FaceBook or Twitter account for persistent spam, because people control their own neighbourhoods. If offended, they can easily discontinue a FaceBook or Twitter contact. There is no real anonymity in either FaceBook or Twitter - each contact there is identified and validated, by its neighbourhood of contacts.
With Blogger, anybody can setup one or more Blogger accounts, for posting comments on any blog that permits comments. A Blogger account has no value, equivalent to a FaceBook or Twitter account. A Blogger account won't be identified, or validated, by its neighbourhood of contacts.
The owner of any blog has a few options, as to what level of anonymity may post comments.Who Can Comment?- Anyone - includes Anonymous Users
- Registered Users - includes OpenID
- Users with Google Accounts
- Only members of this blog
- (For private blogs) Only members and readers of the blog.
Beyond those 5 choices, there is only the Blogger heuristic comment filter, which has to be persistently trained, by each blog owner. You, as the blog owner, moderate either actively or passively. You allow / disallow / tag as "spam" before publishing comments, or you delete / don't delete / tag as "spam" after comments are published. That's the choices that you have, as a blog owner.
You cannot negatively filter comments, by blocking specific individuals. If you were to add a filter for one individual, the owner of the filtered Blogger account could setup another account, and pester you from that account, with impunity. They could even use multiple different accounts, using botted computers, if they wished.
When you publish a Blogger blog and allow commenting on your Blogger blog, you open yourself to the world. For good, or for bad.
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Blogger supports anonymity - both in our ability to maintain and to own a blog anonymously, and our ability to comment on blogs anonymously. But this anonymity comes with a price.I need to contact the owner of "xxxxxxx.blogspot.com", but there is no contact information and the blog is private.
orHow do I find out who left an anonymous comment on my blog?
orI can't access my blog - I forgot the password and the email address doesn't exist any more.
orI deleted my account, and they won't give it back to me!
All of these are queries by bloggers who do not understand the price of anonymity.
If Blogger is going to preserve our anonymity as blog owners, and as commenters (on blogs where anonymous comments are allowed), they cannot give out any information, to anybody, that might disclose our identity.
Blogger / Google must protect anonymity diligently, to be trusted.
If Blogger / Google starts disclosing identity information, to people who ask casually, nobody will be able to trust our - or their - intentions.
If you let people comment anonymously on your blog, people will comment with the expectation that you won't be requiring any personal information, other than demographic information that's obtained through a visitor log. If you don't like anonymous comments, you either disable anonymous comments - or you moderate comments, and discard what you don't like.
You - and only you - must maintain your anonymous, multiple identities.
If you setup a new Blogger account, and then create a new blog, and you include no personal details in either the account or the blog, you will wind up with a Blogger account that cannot be recovered, if you ever forget the account name / password - or if the account is ever locked for "suspicious" / "unusual" activity.
Don't demand that Blogger break someone's anonymity, without legal need.
If someone publishes a blog without a Profile gadget, or publishes a blog privately, without including contact information somewhere, don't expect to casually write to Blogger and demand contact information. And don't try claiming to own the blog in question, and that you forgot the password - or that you cannot remember the many different email addresses that you may have used.
Blogger cannot disclose the identity - including the email address - of the owner, if anonymity is to be preserved. This includes if your blog is deleted, and you don't know the owner account.
You may have to find out owner identity, on your own.
It's possible that you can identify a contact, on your own. If you require contact information provided by Google, you'll need legal assistance, and a court order.
