Anonymity, Your BirthDate, And Your New Blogger / Google Account

Not all new Blogger blog owners understand why they are asked for their birthdate, when they setup a Blogger or Google account. Some folks see this as a violation of their right to privacy, and enter a fake birthdate. Some real serious privacy enthusiasts might enter "01/01/01", just to get through the setup process - maybe intending to correct it, later.

Nobody entering "01/01/01", for one's birthdate, suspects that claiming such a birthdate makes them - in 2013 - appear to be 12 years of age. Unfortunately, 12 years is below the minimum age for owning a Blogger blog. Since Blogger / Google tries to protect the young people on the Internet from inadvertently exposing themselves - or their families or friends - to unknown dangers, people who may appear to be of insufficient age are subject to having their Blogger / Google accounts, and Blogger blogs, deleted or locked.

If you entered a fake birthdate some time ago, and now find your account or blog locked or deleted, you need to prove your age to Google - and you should do this promptly. The Google Accounts document Frequently Asked Questions about Google Account and Age Requirements explains how you do this. The process of verifying your age / birthdate is not convenient - and some privacy enthusiasts may claim that it too violates their privacy rights - but it is necessary, to let you correct your birthdate - when you are legitimately of legal age.

Now, you have to hope that you did not, intentionally or mistakenly, also provide a bogus email account as your Blogger / Google account name / recovery email address. The process of identifying yourself as the owner (former, nominally underage) of a given Blogger / Google account is easier to do, when you have access to the email account stated as the account recovery email address.

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The World Wide Blogger Culture, And Date Formatting Under The New GUI

Since Blogger took the next step with The New Blogger GUI a few months ago, and made it The Default Blogger GUI, complaints about the New GUI have been numerous, and impassioned. One complaint, seen occasionally, mentions the date / time setting wizard, in the Post Editor "Post settings" Schedule.

In the new blogger interface, it is very hard to backdate content. You have to use the calendar GUI, you can't just type a date it. I have content going back 13 years, do you know how hard it is to click the left-arrow on the calendar 144 times to get to the proper date??? It's a nightmare!

This is one person who needs a more flexible date setting wizard, in The New GUI.

In criticising the new date setting wizard, we need to understand the reasons for the design. I don't think that Blogger designed the new wizard, and removed the ability to just type the date, simply because they wanted the new wizard to look shiny.

Since Blogger gave us the ability to compose posts now, and have them published some time in the future, there have been problems with scheduled posts not publishing properly. Both posts published too early, and posts never published, have been the source of many complaints. The reason for many of these complaints were not obvious, however.

When Blogger offered us the scheduled posts option in 2008, they made the ability to schedule posts quite simple. Unfortunately, they did not observe that the entire world does not type the date in the same way. Many scheduling problems were caused by people who did not enter the date properly.

Now that more people are using The New Blogger GUI, and the new date setting wizard, we are seeing significantly less complaints about posts not publishing at the right time (or at all). A large part of the reduction of such complaints, I believe, is due to the design of the new date setting wizard, which does not allow typing of the date - but forces you to explicitly select the month and year by sequential selection - and eliminates the ambiguity.

Unfortunately, this ignores the needs of people who wish to back date (or forward date) by large time spans. So, Blogger needs to make the date setting wizard just a bit more flexible.

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