The other night, I was getting ready to log and head to bed when I noticed something odd: the listing for my MMO Blogroll feed was messed up again:
 |
| As of 11:50 PM EST on October 13, 2026. |
See all those regularly updated blogs unfairly shunted to the bottom of the pile? Yeah, I couldn't explain it either, but when I clicked on one of the links I got basically a bunch of HTML garbage, as if Blogger couldn't understand what the feed was.
Anyway, by during the day yesterday it certainly looked like things were back to normal, except for poor ol' Wilhelm, who had somehow avoided the issues last time but was stuck in hell this time:
 |
| From 5:00 PM EST on October 14, 2026. |
I Have Touched the Sky has been broken since forever, so I discounted that one, but I did check and verify that The Ancient Gaming Noob has a brand new post as of October 14:
 |
| As of 5:01 PM EST on October 14, 2026. |
Ironically enough, both the old post found in my Blogroll and the current post have to do with Richard Garriott of Ultima fame, only 14 years apart. Wilhelm's post encapsulates my opinions of Garriott quite well, so I don't need to hash it out here. I will say, however, that there must have been something in the water at Origin Systems, because both Garriott and Chris Roberts of Star Citizen have what I will politely describe as gone off their rocker over the years. I guess you could call them both a case study in people who have come into too much money and 'street cred' far before they were mature enough to handle it, but I digress.
I guess I was going to have to wait for Wilhelm's blog to be properly read by Blogger, until I was perusing the blogroll and noted something odd:
 |
| As of 6:30 PM EST on October 14, 2026. Yes, I went back and got this screencap after I'd started writing this. |
Knowing Shintar and her current interest in WoW Forever, I didn't trust that that was her most recent post. Sure enough, when I clicked on her blog, I found that yes, she'd made a new post today:
 |
| As of 6:12 PM EST on October 14, 2026. |
So yeah, something is up once again. In the meantime, Blogger has been active in other areas:
 |
| I noticed this early in the day on October 14, 2026. |
I read the notice, and it was all about adult content, non-consensual adult content, scams, hate speech, etc. My first thought while reading this was "You mean to tell me this wasn't there before now?" Better late than never, I guess, although in today's world some people might read this rather reasonable announcement and cry "Censorship!" or worse, "Woke!" But that's the world we live in today in 2026.
Stay tuned, peeps, because I'm sure this whole situation will change in a few days. Again.
***
And just as I was prepping this entry to post in the morning, this happened:
 |
| As of 7:06 PM EST on October 14, 2026. |
Yeah, I don't get it. I mean, it's a feed, and all you have to do is poll it when you reload the blog and you get the latest post. Why did it take so long for Blogger to realize it was there? And still no sign of Wilhelm's blog either.
There are days when I wish that this was 1998, because at least the hypertext was simpler and I knew that if something broke I could fix it. But now, I'm completely dependent upon a company whom is little better than Microsoft at rolling out patches for a platform that I'm not quite convinced that they want to keep supporting.
***
And guess what? The issue on last night HAPPENED AGAIN.
 |
| Taken on 11:45 PM EST on October 14, 2026. |
This time at least I took a screencap of what happens when I clicked on a link or two, such as Priest With a Cause:
 |
| Taken on 11:49 PM EST on October 14, 2026. |
And here's Kaylriene's Blog:
 |
| Taken on 11:49 PM EST on October 14, 2026. |
About the only thing I can say is that if you hover over the blog entry on the problematic links, it definitely shows the /feed hyperlink, not the actual blog hyperlink. On the properly working links, you see the actual blog URL address. How Blogger is screwing this up after well over a decade of stability is a complete unknown to me.
/sigh
I had that with the blog roll a while back, right after they fixed the main issues with it. It only lasted a day, though, and since then it's been fine. I imagine it's because they've woken up to the idea that they have a blogging platform and have started fiddling with it. Benign neglect is a much underrated benefit.
ReplyDeleteAs for the Terms and Conditions, I'm pretty sure most of that was already there but who ever looks at it? It might have been nice if they'd highlighted the parts that have changed, though.
There's another recent change, which is that you can now automatically link to Google Maps from the Blogger dashboard. They're adding a bunch of stuff like that so I'd expect more disruption until they lose interest and move on to some other part of Google's massive empire.
I believe this all started a few years ago when Google decided to migrate off of their old analytics plug-ins and to the current GA4 model. Once that started, Google slowly woke up from their benign neglect (as you so aptly put it) and realized that they could monetize Blogger in similar fashion to what they've done elsewhere. Except, of course, blogging platforms are extraordinarily resistant to things such as pop-up or unskippable ads, and the number of users who utilize Blogger (create and/or read) have a potentially superior option out there in Wordpress. Normally, this would be a recipe for Google to simply shut the service down, but I suspect that they do make a profit off of Blogger, because someone finally figured out that it's much cheaper to host Blogger than anything else, and if they got rid of Blogger they essentially are removing millions of websites that they could scrape from for Gemini to be trained with.
DeleteHmm... now that I think about it, if keeping Blogger active is a side effect of all this AI crap, then I think I've found something good that came out of it. Google Search (and Google Gemini, I checked while writing this reply) still doesn't know that this blog exists, however, so I guess that I've effectively slid into the cracks of the internet where Google is concerned.