Blog Security Review Is Not Instantaneous

Blog owners do not always understand the reasons behind the mysterious blog security check (following "suspicious" / "unusual" activity account lock).

We see periodic complaints about deleted blogs and locked accounts - and the inconvenience involved, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue.

I get the security and all - but I don't get how a blog is just deleted.

This blog owner, like so many, does not understand how Blogger is trying to keep our blogs under our control - even after detection of "suspicious" / "unusual" activity.

Blog security check, if immediate and instantaneous, would not be noticed.

Blog security check is an art - not a science - and it takes time.

If blogs could be checked for hacking interference without delay, most owners would not complain. Unfortunately, examining blogs for hacking interference requires intense study - and most security experts do not work on weekends.

One unfortunate issue, about all of this, is that not all "suspicious" / "unusual" activity is malicious. Some of it is a simple result of people unable to use account / blog recovery - being innocently told to try every account name and password that can be remembered.

Owner delay, in requesting account unlock, contributes to security check delay.

In some cases, the locked account / deleted blogs may not be immediately discovered by the owner - and this may lengthen the security check process.

Not all blog owners publish - or even read - their blogs regularly. Nor do they accept the need to intentionally keep their account and blogs under their control.

Some owners are very casual about blog security - until a blog is successfully stolen.

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Some #Blogger blog owners are not terribly impressed by the need to keep their blogs under their control, until a blog is stolen. The measures taken by Blogger / Google Security staff are considered mere annoyances.

Account Recovery, Evaluated As Return On Investment

Too many Blogger blog owners, seeking recovery of a long dormant account, overlook the realities of the Blogger business relationship.

I started the blog 10 years ago, I have forgotten the password, the email address is long gone - and I need the blog deleted now.

When told that deletion is not possible, if you cannot provide proof of ownership, they next ask for personal assistance.

But isn't there a person to whom I can explain my problem? Surely we can reach some understanding!

The reality is that Blogger wants to help their customers - when helping their customers provides them some business benefit.

Any business, that hopes to remain a business for any amount of time, has to understand the realities of Return On Investment, combined with Risk Management.

One basic calculation of ROI is

(Sum of benefits) / (Sum of costs)

Both benefits and costs can be tangible (income, expense, etc) and non tangible (inconvenience to customers, increased / decreased reputation, etc). Projects which provide more ROI can be scheduled, with more urgency - and projects which provide less ROI, with less urgency.

In problem management, problems which affect many people, when solved, produce some benefit. Problems which affect few people, when solved, produce little benefit.

A project which involves account recovery requires individual assistance, and benefits only the claimant - thus provides very little benefit.

It will require considerable research, to verify the identity of the person who setup an account or blog, and to verify the identity of the person asking for assistance - thus much cost. Additional cost would be the risk of encouraging more Blogger blog owners to overlook the necessities of blog ownership - and to not bother with remembering account name and password - thus ensuring more of the same, later. And there's the risk of enabling a deceptive blog hijacking.

ROI for most account recovery projects is very low.

A project which requires blog deletion (when ownership cannot be proven by the
claimant) provides even less benefit than simple account recovery - as the only result is the removal of one dormant Blogger account / blog. And it involves the same cost - both the same amount of research - to verify identities - and the same risk of encouraging more, similar thoughtlessness. And again, there's the risk of enabling a deceptive blog hijacking.

ROI for blog deletions is even lower than for simple account recoveries.

Both account recovery and blog deletion, when accepted as activity in the Blogger Support action queues, will, out of necessity, not receive high priority.

The memory of impatience, from previous claimants, will motivate many Blogger experts and Blogger Support staff to simply quote the Google Help advice.

At Google, we take your privacy and security very seriously. Therefore, we're committed to returning accounts only when we're sure we're giving them back to the accounts' owners. Because Google doesn't ask for much personal information when you sign up for an account, we don't have many ways to verify that you own an account.

Some advice given will be somewhat perfunctory.

Please, read the FAQ, and objectively consider the bigger picture.

This attitude, too, is an expectation of low ROI - special service demanded by people who never did anything with their blogs - and now, plan to simply move their blogging activity to WordPress.

Blogger Doesn't Care About Frequency Or Quantity Of Blog Updates

The process of "bidding" determines who is best suited to take on a given task, in some multi party games and relationships.

In the game of Contract Bridge, the players of the game get a chance to assess their personal holdings of the cards dealt to them, and the probable holdings of their prospective partner and opponents - and predict the number of rounds ("tricks") that they expect to win, in the game to come.

In the "game" of construction bidding, contractor firms get the chance to predict how much funds they will require, to perform a given project, given the chance by the firm bidding the project.

In both cases, different parties bid for the right to perform a task. Some would be blog owners think that procedure should apply to blog ownership.

I want this URL - It's the perfect URL for my needs - for my blog. The URL is in use, but it hasn't been updated, recently. Why can't Blogger give me that URL?

In the Blogger Name Availability "game", the implication is

The current owner isn't using that URL properly, and I know that I can do a better job!

Unfortunately, there is no bidding process here. Blogger, in This blog has been abandoned and I want its address says simply

Blogger accounts and Blog*Spot addresses do not expire. Therefore, we can't take away somebody's blog address to give to you.

Blogger isn't going to setup a bidding process, or a courts system, to decide whether a given URL should be reassigned to you, or to some other hopeful party. If the URL is in use, it's not going to be available. The current owner of a blog has the right and responsibility to decide upon blog contents, including how often and how many updates should be made to the blog.

Not so long ago, with the owner given the latter choice to make, my advice for getting the blog well known would be to "publish, publish, publish" - because the more publishing that was done to a blog, the more random "Next Blog" traffic would be directed to the blog. In November, 2009, that changed. Now, your blog has an equal chance of getting random "Next Blog" traffic if you publish daily, as if you published once, 5 years ago - and never again.

The frequency and volume of updates, to your blog, are irrelevant to the validity of that blog. If you believe that your readers will be happier with you publishing daily, fine. If you believe that your blog is just as good as it's ever going to get, that's fine too. It's your blog, and it's your decision.

And somebody else's blog is their decision - and Blogger supports that decision.

Blogger accounts and Blog*Spot addresses do not expire. Therefore, we can't take away somebody's blog address to give to you.

If you need a URL for your blog, pick one that's available, and make the contents of your new blog valuable. Value comes from the blog contents, not from the URL.

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Some would be #Blogger blog owners would like Blogger to accept bids, for assigning the right to publish blogs to popular URLs. I've even seen the suggestion that bidding should be a paid feature, for Blogger URL assignment, with owner contact information for each blog being required.

Blogger provides blog names, on a "first come, first served" basis - payment is irrelevant. Blog names are available for eternity, poor or rich. And anonymous ownership is part of the promise.

How To Not Get The BlogSpot URL Of Your Choice

The controversy continues, in that many bloggers cannot think of a URL for their blog, other than ones that are already taken.

Some are so desperate that they think of imaginative but Pyrrhic solutions.

Solution here would be a way to report this as a kind of abuse (Yes I know it's not really abuse in any form) or otherwise get in contact with the owner. And I don't mean hunting down the contact information from the web as it practically newer works. I mean there should be an option "I would like to contact the owner of this blog" or something similar.

Here we see two alternatives, neither with any future.

The suggestion to file an abuse complaint is, in itself, abusive.

The people who handle hacking, porn, and spam complaints have enough to do with genuine hacking, porn, and spam problems. Reporting a dormant blog to the abuse desk will get you:

1. Ignored.
2. Told not to do that again.
3. Possibly, and if you repeat such abusive action, your Blogger account should be cancelled.

If you want that URL, are you the only one who wants it?

The idea to have Blogger contact the current owner, on your behalf has merit - if you don't consider the details. For any URL that somebody owns, if one other person wants that URL, there are probably a few other people who would want that same URL.

If you were the current owner of a popular URL, would you want repeated emails (on behalf of the same person, repeating a request, or on behalf of more than one person, intermittently) to read, simply asking you to voluntarily give up your URL?

What would happen, should you (the current owner of a demanded URL) accede to such request? Who would be the winner, in the crowd submitting the "Give it to me!" demand through Blogger? The first person, or the most persistent person? Would you want to be the Blogger employee who would get to decide the winner, in such a contest?

The Blogger policy, on URL reassignment, is quite simple.

Neither voluntary URL resignation, nor involuntary URL reassignment, have any part of the monolithic Blogger statement

Blogger accounts and Blog*Spot addresses do not expire. Therefore, we can't take away somebody's blog address to give to you.

Use some imagination, and pick an available URL. Start your blog now, and work on the content. That's how you get readers. Not by picking the "perfect" URL.