A Blog Will Always Have At Least One Administrator

Almost daily, we see a confused query in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken

I 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.

1. Invite a new member (if necessary).
2. Wait while the new member accepts the invitation (again, if necessary).
3. Make the new member an administrator.
4. 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.

Blog Ownership - Possession Is The Law

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.

1. Some bloggers managed to remove all administrators from the list, creating blogs with no administrators.
2. 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.

1. The safeguard works only if you can guarantee that all administrators can perform as administrators.
2. 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.

Transferring A Blog From One EMail Account To Another - An Alternate

I've written about the simple procedure of transferring a blog from one Blogger account to another, and how simple it should be.

Sometimes reality steps in - and the normal transfer procedure won't work.

• Maybe you don't want your EMail (GMail) address known by the current blog owner.
• Maybe the two EMail addresses are thoroughly tangled - you invite the second EMail address as a blog member but just don't get the email - even in "Bulk" or "Spam"! What to do?
• Maybe you opened the invitation email under one account, but were logged in to Blogger using the other account. This can happen if you execute the transfer, using just one browser.

Sometimes, having ignored one or two basic (to me) rules of Blogger account existence, you just can't send a membership invitation to a second Blogger account.

Here's where we think outside the box.

• Setup an extra email account, based upon any non GMail email address. I'll suggest Yahoo.com as an example here - but you can use whatever email service works for you.
• Go to Settings - Permissions, and add your new Yahoo email address as an invited member.
• For the Yahoo email part of the process, use a separate browser. If this browser has been used before, clear cache, cookies, and authenticated sessions, restart the browser, and login again to Yahoo. Start with a clean browser here.
• Go to your Yahoo email account, and open your email. Remember to look in your "Bulk" or "Spam" folder, if you don't see anything in "Inbox".
• Accept membership in the blog.
• When you're asked for an account / password, select "Use a different account"!
• Enter the second Blogger account name (address), and the correct password for that account.
• Go back to the Permissions display, and refresh.
• Verify that you have a new member in the Author list.
• Return to the normal procedure, and complete the transfer.

A little extra work, that. But if you need to transfer control of the blog, to make it possible to manage the blog from the other Blogger account, it's probably worth it.

And, next time you transfer blog ownership, you will (hopefully) use two browsers, in the transfer.