Showing posts with label o. Show all posts
Showing posts with label o. Show all posts

Thursday, May 31, 2012

Dear Blogger: stop redirecting me to a profile creation page when I'm logged into a non-Blogger google account

I have more than one Google account. One of them I use for this blog, the others I use for other purposes. My other Google accounts don't have associated Blogger accounts because I don't use them for blogs.

Lately, when I go to blogger.com while signed into another Google account, I get this page (click to embiggen:



This page wants me to create either a Google+ account or a Blogger account associated with my other Google accounts. It doesn't give me an option to log out and log back in as my Blogger identity. To do that, I have to go back to google.ca and sign out.

But it gets worse.

When I try to read blog comments, I'm also getting redirected to the account creation page. This includes comments on my own blog, which I quite deliberately permit people to comment on without being logged in. While the radio buttons for commenting anonymously still exist, it won't let you get as far as the comment field without having a blogger account. (Readers with non-blogger Google accounts: you can still view the comments by clicking on the permalink in the post time at the bottom of each post.)

But it gets worse.

The cookies Google/Blogger are using are too persistent, even within the internal logic of this new strategy. When I try to go to blogger.com logged into the wrong account and then go back to google.ca to log out, blogger.com doesn't remember that I've logged out and takes me back to the account creation page. I have to go to google.ca, log out, log into the Google account associated with my blog, and then go back to blogger.com.

And this last time that I logged out to get the screenshot above, even that didn't work. I logged out on google.ca, logged in to my Blogger account, went to blogger.com, hit the account creation page even though I was already logged into an existing Blogger account, and ultimately had to go to my own blog and click on the Blogger icon on the top left to get into my Blogger dashboard. WTF?? Once I hit this horrible account creation screen, it starts popping up everywhere and hindering useability.

So, Blogger, here's what you need to do:

1. When people hit something they need a Blogger account for, like logging into blogger.com, give them a page where they can log in OR create an account.

2. When people hit something they don't need a Blogger account for, like viewing comments, don't try to make them to log in or create an account.

3. Make this screen less persistent, so it doesn't keep popping up illogically just because the user it it once.

This is hindering useability. It's a struggle to log into my own blog. Please fix it now.

Update: Now the same problem is happening with the "Sign In" link at the top right corner of my blog. I'm not signed in, I click on it to sign in, and it doesn't let me sign in, instead trying to get me to create an account under the other google identity I have logged in. #FAIL