Tuesday 5 February 2019

Google+ commenting


As we were made aware in October last year Google+ will be going away. I raised the question what would happen to our G+ comments integrated into the blog. It would appear we now have the answer - they are just going to be scrapped. Everyone will be reverting to standard blogger comments and everything anyone has ever posted will be deleted. So we can all look forward to our blogs being denuded of any evidence of interaction with followers and friends whatsoever.

With no possibility to migrate the comments I'm really kicking myself that I didn't follow through with my plan to switch in October. When I did it all went wrong anyway - with a vision of what was to come all the G+ comments disappeared, when I reinstated G+ they came back but the dashboard data of how many comments attached to each blog post was reset to zero. This ultimately led me to [mistakenly] stick with G+ comments in the hope Google would offer some workaround/migration protocol. That would appear not to be the case.

Not only have Google failed to do something in the interim they couldn't even be bothered to confirm the situation well in advance - Google's own blogpost on the topic is full of people disappointed/annoyed at this failure and the irony that their own G+ commentary will also disappear has not been lost on them. Obviously I'm really annoyed, and particularly with all the personal support I've received from everyone recently the thought that that interaction will be culled is upsetting, but probably we're powerless to do anything...

So, where does that leave us, well I wasn't going to take down the G+ comments just yet as I was hopeful some migration or at the least 3rd party archival guide would appear but it looks like we've already been moved over to blogger commenting, so BE AWARE.

However, you may want to explore this:

Blogger and other sites may use Google+ for their commenting system. Comments on blogs may also exist as posts or comments on Google+. This feature will be removed from Blogger by Feb 4th and other sites by March 7th. All your Google+ comments on all sites will be deleted starting April 2, 2019. You can download and save these comments.
So give it a click and download all your comments, you have until April 2nd when all G+ comments will be removed! I think it might specifically be the Google+ Stream, as that has 'comments' in. Whether that is just your comments or comments left on your blog as well I'll have to see, currently my Stream is clocking in at 2GB so it might take a while...

6 comments:

  1. It sucks Dave TBH & only hurts our little community :(

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    1. The worry is for the blogger platform itself. Does this mean there will be investment in it or will it also be left to whither and die? We can talk about Wordpress as an alternative, that's true but Google has an active user base of 540 million bloggers, whereas Wordpress was 75 million the last time I investigated this.

      You'd think sustaining half a billion 'customers' would be a worthwhile enterprise. When was the last time blogger had a features update? Aside from the ability to embed emojis :)

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  2. That's rough and I feel for you. It's the risk any of us take by using a 3rd party platform. I mean, you'd think you'd be safe since we're talking two Google products here, but their track record on their products is historically sketchy. It's just one of the reasons I ditched Disqus on my site a few months back, same could happen there at some point.

    Losing comments truly sucks and I hope someone figures something out for you all.

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  3. I received notification of this on my blog at the same time that they deleted all of the comments. They are all gone.

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    1. Try the link Marc, see if you can download the archive...

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  4. I've just noticed all my comments have disappeared. I don't know if they were there the other day or not, but there gone now.

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