UAE Community Blog: Blogger.com issues?

05 February, 2006

Blogger.com issues?

UPDATE: John Chilton provided this link which indicates that it is a Blogger.com issue affecting a lot of bloggers.

I've now contacted Blogger.com through their support pages and, bless their little cotton socks, they sent me an immediate email with lots of links for me to click - none of which helped to explain any of the problems!

Will update further with any news that I receive - or feel free to comment on whatever you learn about the issues in the meantime.

BLOGGER STATUS has an update now that this page is also back online.

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This is not a UAE-related post per se, but one that has relevance to all Blogger.com users.

Has anyone been experiencing problems with their service in the past few weeks?

Things that I've noticed:
- posts disappearing
- comments disappearing (although the Comment count seems to register them)
- error messages saying that Blogger is unable to complete my request
- images not able to be uploaded to their server
- Blogs not able to be found - server error messages (and I know that these blogs should still be accessible)

Just wondering if anyone else has noticed these issues - or others?

Please list what you're experiencing, and I'll write to Blogger tonight to log the issues with them - bearing in mind that some of the issues may not be of their doing!

19 comments:

CG said...: yes I have noticed.; 05 February, 2006 09:50
Anonymous said...: better shift to wordpress; 05 February, 2006 10:20
samuraisam said...: yeah i think blogspot was supposed to have maintainence yesterday, so perhaps this is just fallout.; 05 February, 2006 10:25
CG said...: aha....seems a lot of blogs are forbidden today.; 05 February, 2006 10:45
snow white said...: Yup, my blog's been down for about 10 hours, which I thought was because of a couple of cheeky (though harmless) posts ....

Message is
We can't find "http://dubaidrama.blogspot.com/"
Error - DNS error or server not found

phew ... wasn't sure how the world could possibly manage without DDQ!; 05 February, 2006 11:04
Dubai Sunshine said...: One of my posts disappeared yesterday....And some comments are not showing up on blog. And I also got a "not authorized to view this page"...I thought it was just my blog....guess not!; 05 February, 2006 11:08
nzm said...: anonymous @ 10:20 - any smart blogger would be using at least 2 different blog hosts - and also have html copies of their blog posts saved on their hard-drives/cd-roms etc.

All the blog hosts have issues at some time. Right now, I want to know what's going on with Blogger.com.

Samuraisam - yes, the blogger servers have been out for maintenance several times over the past few weeks. The status for the outage on Saturday 4th has been logged as Completed.

I can't find anything on their website to reflect the issues, so want to write to them to personally address them, and at the same time, I'm happy to also report to them any issues that other bloggers may also be experiencing with Blogger.

When I get a reply, will share it with you.

cheers
nzm; 05 February, 2006 11:11
John B. Chilton said...: Blogger has been having troubles lately. When I wonder if it is UAE specific I usually try a blog outside the UAE as a test.

If you've lost posts you might try republishing your blog to see if that resolves the issue. I've been getting a message after I post that says "your post has been saved, republish after 10 minutes for your post to appear."

Yesterday blogger did give me a jolt -- for most of the morning UAE community blog was coming up You are Forbidden to View.

See also:
Blogger News Network: Most Of Blogger Is Back Online Now; 05 February, 2006 11:44
samuraisam said...: It isn't UAE specific, there is no way to distinguish UAE blogs and non-UAE blogs anyway, other than profiles, but I can't see why they'd target the whole of the UAE, after all this is google (blogger is owned by google), they fought against the US govt's orders, i'm sure they'd be really scared if the "men in white" paid them a visit. I'm in Australia and I couldn't visit dubai drama queen's blog, IIRC the network was having maintenance performed and having some routers or something replaced recently.
I had two comments left on my blog by archer14, and I moderate them all, so they appeared in my email client, I pressed publish (to accept the comments for publication), and blogger said it couldn't process them, and in my settings the comments are not on my to-be-moderated list, which means they've "dissappeared", furthermore a posting I did yesterday, "Democracy Sucks." was deleted without reason ):
I wouldn't bother plotting a move from blogger to anything else, the roots established through the uaecommunity blog at the moment would be difficult to rebuild; Also I don't think it's possible to place page counters on livejournal etc, which I would list at the very least as being essential, as I like to know who is reading my blog, and sometimes the results are surprising. All i'll say is, be careful what you write (:; 05 February, 2006 12:44
nzm said...: Hi John

Republishing's a good idea, but it didn't help in this case - the comments that I added to our blog still did not appear.

I also couldn't access DDQ and Jenny Foreigner this morning, but now both of them are back up again.; 05 February, 2006 14:22
BuJ said...: I've noticed some problems.
Whenever I log in, the later it is the less blogs I can view. The last 2 nights (3 Feb and 4 Feb) after around 10pm I cannot refresh any blog. That would be 2am Dubai time.

Otherwise, no posts or comments missing to my knowledge.; 05 February, 2006 14:39
B.D. said...: Four times I published the same post yesterday--a rather complicated one in fact--in one of my blogs, and it repeatedly disappeared. Finally I thought I was being smart by posting a copy as a draft but that too has disappeared. Although the last version of the post still exists, as in the URL works, it does not exist on my dashboard.

What's scary is that I have a couple hundred posts--including some with extensive amounts of links, photos and template modifications, and none are backed up! It's like cleaning the garage--you know you've got to do it but tomorrow always seems like a better day to start than today.

That being said, I love Blogger and wouldn't think of switching.; 05 February, 2006 16:41
samuraisam said...: bd: I have posts that i have specifically deleted over 6 months ago, yet they still appear when accessed by their URL, which is why I edit my posts to [censored] before deleting them, otherwise you may get stuck with something you don't want for ever.

As for backing up posts, depending on your settings, blogger should email a copy of your postings as soon as they're published to your email address, I can't remember if this is an optional setting, but delve into the control panel...; 05 February, 2006 16:46
nzm said...: Judging by the link that John provided, we're not the only ones suffering from these issues.; 05 February, 2006 19:48
moryarti said...: i have received something with in the lines of "blogger can not process your request at the moment" messages recently ...; 05 February, 2006 23:21
Anonymous said...: Yesterday I had to repost and repost and repost 'til I got damned and stop reposting. I even thought of bizarre conclusions that I might have been monitored or something.

Sigh, I feel relieved that I'm no loner in this case.

Funny how my young mind thinks.; 06 February, 2006 00:14
B.D. said...: Thanks Samuraisam for the tip about getting posts emailed. I know the setting you're talking about but I had never tried it.

I'm glad to hear my post won't be deleted which will save me the trouble of having to create it again.; 06 February, 2006 16:33
nzm said...: BD

Blogger has a plug-in that you can download and it installs in Microsoft Word.

If you use Microsoft Word, this is very handy - you can then write your posts in Word, and then click on the Blogger toolbar buttons that appear when the plug-in is installed.

The buttons allow you to then download the post to your Blogger account as a published article or as a draft. You have to be online, but you don't have to be logged into Blogger.com.

Then you can save the Word document as your back-up on your computer.

More on it here

cheers
nzm; 06 February, 2006 18:05
Neeren said...: The issue is much more serious. For me first all my blogs were gone and I started creating the blogs again and I could use the same urls for the blogs as the previous one. Later my whole account was gone because I could create the account with the same name as previous one. And now if I try to create the blogs again the message comes that the blog is unavailable but if try to go to the url thru browser the url is not found. For e.g try creating a blog with name rozeksher and it will not be created. and if you go to the url rozeksher.blogspot.com it won;t be found.; 17 February, 2006 08:41