Old wiring

photo: yung chang

Increasingly over the past two years, bloggers in the help community say they can't

• sign in from their blog—from the public "front end" of the blog at blogspot.com, connecting to the back end at blogger.com
• leave comments on blogs—even their own!—from their Google accounts
• find the quick-edit tools
• managing comments on their blogs, or delete comments they made on other blogs

These problems (often) have the same cause: Blogger's outdated dependence on tracking cookies.

Blogger relies on third-party tracking cookies to connect the front and back ends of Blogger—blogspot to blogger.

This is a legacy technology that everybody, including Google, wants to get away from. Widespread use of these cookies, once accepted, has led to privacy concerns.

Tracking cookies

Today, most browsers block these trackers. Browsers let you make exceptions to the blocking policy, so that you can enable those cookies for blogger.com, but continue to block them for everything else.

Unfortunately, not everybody knows about that, or wants to. They just experience these problems as their favorite browsers add more restrictions.

Also unfortunately, the unblocking process is different for each browser. Also, browsers are always changing their user interface, and where the "exceptions" controls live.

Your readers may encounter this problem when they try to leave a comment on your blog. If you have seen an uptick in anonymous comments, that may be why.

Solving this is a major, difficult problem that could entail disruptions and upheavals to other parts of Blogger.

I won't be surprised if we all get new blog urls in the process. Won't that be fun!

Or, maybe, Google can fix this with behind-the-scenes rewiring.

That would be a technical tour-de-force.

For more on this: third-party tracking cookies.