Never delete a Blogger profile

A built-in email subscription service for Blogger would be cool. Image handling could be a whole lot better.

We really need some basic versioning for draft blog posts. Hey, how about making those super-handy quick-edit tools available for everybody? How about undo?

With these very real needs, it is with mixed feelings that I greet the most recent new feature from Blogger: deleting your Blogger profile.

Which you should never do.

Just never

There are better alternatives.

Deleting the profile page will also delete your blogs, except for team blogs, making their web addresses unavailable permanently.

• You can do this already.

For team blogs, if any, your posts there will be anonymized, but retained. You won't be able to edit them after you do this.

• You can do this by renaming your profile to "unknown."

Deleting the profile will delete any comments you've left on blogs using this account.

• You can do this already.

Furthermore, deleting your profile cannot be undone, though after a few days the ability to start over again with Blogger will return to your account.

Profile

When you make your first blog, Google creates a profile for you. You can edit it to show more or less information, and even hide it if you like. You don't have to use your real name.

The "About Me" widget, if you use it in your blog, displays the profile name, image, and description, even if you hide the profile page. 

Of course, you can delete the widget from your blog, if you like. Furthermore, you can reverse any of those actions.

But if you delete your profile, you can't undo. And, you may regret it. From the Blogger help community:

yesterday by mistake i deleted my blogger profile and now i am not able to bring my blogger profile anyone can help me to restore my blogger profile

Regret

This user blew past the following lengthy warnings from Google:

Read the fine print

Just to hammer this home, here is the text of that warning box (emphasis added).

Delete your Blogger profile

• This will delete your Blogger profile and blogs you've managed*
• This will not delete blogs you've jointly managed or written or have lost access to
• This will delete posts you've published on blogs that you wrote
• This will anonymize posts you've published on blogs that you did not write or blogs you lost access to**
• This will delete any comments you've made on Blogger while being signed in to this Google Account***
• This will delete videos you've uploaded to Blogger
• This will not delete images you've uploaded to Blogger. They'll remain in your Album Archive
• This will delete your Reading List
• Note: This will not delete content you've uploaded to other Google services, like YouTube, and separately reposted on Blogger

*Reminder: You cannot reuse the web address of a deleted blog.

**Note that "blogs that you did not write" refers to any team blogs, even where you were the administrator. Blogs on other accounts are not deleted, including "blogs you lost access to."

***It might take a day or two for comments to be deleted.

It's as notable for what it doesn't delete as for what it does.

To delete the profile, and actually all of Blogger from your account, you'd have to

1. choose the delete button on the profile page, 
2. sign in a second time, and then 
3. click again to get the above formidable warning box.

Then you'd have to check the checkbox before clicking the "delete" link.

Required: Yes, I understand that this will permanently delete my Blogger profile, and that this action can't be undone

Check the box and the "Delete Blogger profile" link goes live.

There's no going back. Though after a few days, you could start over from scratch.

Don't click it.

So, what's the problem?

I view this unforgiving, irreversible feature as though it were a button on the dashboard of my car that said "destroy the engine." 

I concede that if what you want to do to a car is to trash the engine, this would be handy.

But the potential for mischief would outweigh any usefulness, no matter how clearly the button were labeled.

So...why?

Remember, everything about your profile page is optional.

You can hide the page.

You can hide the widget.

You can delete all your blogs (though you shouldn't). 

You control what, if anything, others can see of your profile.

And yet, the ability to delete it entirely and irrevocably is what Google chose to give us recently.

So, if you did this, why? 

If you regret doing it, I'm sorry.

While we're at it

• Never delete a Blogger blog
• Never deleted a Google account