2024/05/14

Blogger Help, Please

Hello, friends.

If you've been on Blogger long enough, you may be as flummoxed as I about the changes on the operations side. Or, you may be young or young-in-the-head enough to enlighten me on a few points, if you please.

Note: I use Firefox on a laptop.

1) Who can comment, being the top issue I would like to fix.
 
I would like to set up who can comment like this:
But in "settings", these are the only options I have:
If I set it to Anyone, it defaults to Anonymous, which is what I want to avoid.
I monitor comments now because of spams. (I also have issues with legit comments without any name/moniker/identity, which is why I use Google Accounts, but that's a different issue.)

2) The ability to comment

Even when Blogger acknowledges I am logged in, (see the tiny profile pic?) sometimes I can't type on the Enter Comment line. This problem is sporadic, and neither can I tell what fixes it automagically, but it eventually does. Do you know why? Does it happen to you??
3) Blogger not acknowledging me as the author

As you can see at top right, Blogger knows I'm logged in, and presumably that I am the author. (Sometimes, even when I go from writing a post to View Blog, this doesn't happen.)  
But at the bottom, I don't get the pencil mark to allow me to go straight into the post to edit/amend. For a spelling mistake from 9 years ago, I must go search for the posts in the Posts/Published section.
Whereas on some of the other blogs, I get the pencil. I don't remember changing anything, although I may have in 18 years of Unravelling.
From Layout/Main/Blog Posts/Edit, I don't see a likely button for the pencil.
Any ideas? (I'm also curious about the Author Profile at the top of this last pic, as opposed to Show Author about the middle in the top pic.)

Since Google started begging for cookies on my own blog, posting photos is slower or the screen freezes. I'm sure Google is storing all of our photos somewhere for their use, even in private blogs. It makes me even more cautious about posting people pics, which is sad.

Thank you for any help, in advance.

[EDIT] I just realized I asked for your help but you may not be able to comment because of the various problems I described!! If this is the case, please email me at MegWeaves at gmail dot com. Thank you.

3 comments:

Leigh said...

I've have no trouble posting comments to your blog, so I don't know about that. My husband's blog has the same problem of no edit pencil icon in the posts. Like you, I've searched everywhere to enable it, but can't find anything. You might could try hitting the feedback button (question mark in the upper right) to report/ask about it. No one will answer you, but maybe it will get fixed.

Alternatively, you could try the blogger community forum, although I have found it to be pretty useless, even with their "experts."

My feeling is that Blogger is not a priority project for Google, so it mostly seems to be maintained by newbie developers who create problems they don't know how to fix. Everything is formatted for people on cell phones, so those of us on desktop are out of luck in the usefulness department.

My current pet peeve is that all the comments I make on my own fiber journal, end up in the gmail spam folder. It doesn't matter how many times I hit "not spam" they end up there anyway!

Leigh said...

P.S. Comment choices, yeah, they are limited. But I suspect that would involve some kind of a code overhaul, which as I said, likely isn't a Blogger priority.

Meg said...

Re. who can comment, I screenshot the top pic from your blog, Leigh. That's what I want here. The pencil I had on Monday and Tuesday mysteriously disappeared on Wednesday. Peter, a long-time Blogger friend, said he read something about their policies, and the pencil may be going away, possibly to do with spamming. But he encountered a whole new comment problem when he tried to write here, (the screen kept going back to his Author Profile?????) so I've kind of given up. Not sure if he uses a laptop or an iPad, but probably not phone. Just speculating here.

If I can make "Who can comment" look like yours, I'd be happy. Otherwise, I guess "Anyone" and delete spams and live with the really Anonymous ones... I think...

As you say, "they" are not interested in keeping/making this user-friendly.