Friday, May 13, 2011

Blogger, why must you torture us?

Unless you were lucky enough to be away from the blogosphere for the past 24 hours, you probably realized that there was something going on. If you tried to leave comments, you got an error message. If you tried to log in to your own blog, you were met with this:

blogger downWell, sure. Okay. Let's just visit that Blogger Status to see those additional details, shall we?

blogger downUm, what? Not only does that not tell me what is going on, but you've actually removed my posts? How in the world can that be helpful?

Considering the description for this page...

blogger outageAm I the only one feeling like that isn't exactly accurate? The update doesn't tell me a single detail about the problem or what is being done about it... not to mention that "soon" seems to be a fairly relative term for Blogger. The downtime ended up being more than 20 hours, something that doesn't count as "soon" in my book.

Whatever. The good news is that Blogger is back.

Sort of.

As of right this minute, any drafts that I started in the past few days are gone and the giveaways that were posted yesterday are at least slowly returning (one is back but one is not)... and the comments haven't appeared with them. There are also hundreds of comments missing from all of the other giveaways that are up that are hopefully on their way back soon.

Both Jenna and I are aware that there are comments missing from all of our Celebrating Mom giveaways and we will be holding off on closing the giveaways or picking winners until we are certain that everything is 100% back to normal. Also, if you tried to leave a comment or tweet at all during the time that Blogger was down, please leave them today, they're still completely valid.

In the end, at least Blogger has apologized and is working to get things completed. But... is it enough? I won't ever get the time back and the already too-tight schedule that I keep for blogging has been completely ruined and will take quite a while to recover.

How has it all affected you? If you have a blog on Blogger, are you already planning to switch to a different platform?

11 comments:

Unknown said...

I know im just glad it back up now!

dannyscotland said...

I'm not switching yet, but that's only because I don't have a review/giveaway blog. If I did, I'd be outta here.

Mellisa said...

I played catch up on Thursday morning only to find out that these posts were all removed! It's frustrating and very scary to know that hours of my time could have been completely wasted.

This really does get me thinking about whether I should switch or not.

Anonymous said...

I learned if you can find in your history when you wrote the post. It will be able to be cut and pasted from history. This will save you having to rewrite. I'm trying to find my posts now. However, I do have a great giveaways post that disappeared for one of your hayneedle giveaway. I am searching it out and will repost but my link will no longer work so I will send you the new one.

d schmidt said...

Its really upsetting to know the posts have disappeared.

Stuff Parents Need said...

I'm hosting a review and giveaway of an ebook that walks you through how to move from blogger to wordpress (it goes live on Sunday). Oh heck yes, I'm moving in the next 30 days!

Create With Joy said...

I had already planned to move to WordPress prior to this and would already be there if I were not having so much trouble choosing among my options!

In all fairness to Blogger, this could happen with ANY company. I went through this nightmare only a few weeks ago with Photobucket and it took them a LOT longer to get things up and running - and they were even less communicative about the process!

If you do not already do so, be sure to set your blog up so that when a post is published, or a comment is received, you immediately get a copy in your e-mail. That way, you have a record of everything in case, God forbid, you ever end up having to recreate everything yourself!

This week, we're discussing Blog Design at Create With Joy. I hope you will stop by when you have a moment and share your thoughts - our weekly discussions have been fabulous!

Ramona
http://create-with-joy.com

Judy Whatilivefor said...

I purchased a domain through blogger yesterday morning and had everything set up at my new location only to have it completely disappear and not "exist" according to Blogger...and I still can't get to it. Uggh!

LeeAnn said...

Even though I'm still ridiculously angry about this, and my blog still hasn't been restored to the way it was, I have no intentions of jumping the Blogger ship. This can happen to any company. I highly doubt my blog would be back to even the way it is now if I self-hosted it. Unfortunately, things like this happen, even to the biggest companies out there.

I'm still holding out hope that they will manage to get everything back. ::fingers crossed::

Jenny said...

It was very annoying. I kept staying up to post and finally gave up and tried it the next day.

However, I'm sure it really screwed things up for you. You have so many posts and giveaways, what a mess!

Kitty said...

Had that problem. Couldn't leave comments if I used google acct but when I switched to 'Anonymous' it would take the comment. I dislike that blogger requires cookies to be turned on to post comments. My work PC (all PCs at work cannot accept cookies) has cookies permanently disabled and they can't be enabled. So, that is why blogger truly annoys me. ***[Of course I am visiting sites on my break and lunch hour.]