We’ve all seen the serious problems on the Biased-BBC site over the last few weeks.
Please let me explain them and also say what we have been doing to sort them out.
Two separate problems occurred almost simultaneously and you may have assumed they were connected – but they were not.
* Google began a rollout of regional blog identities. This is designed specifically to allow them to control/censor content in different countries. In practice for us that means that we have been commenting on at least 5 different B-BBC sites and so our comments have been scattered. There’s no useful fix for this.
* Google also withdrew the Google Friend login facility last month. As our Comment provider, Echo, is no longer being supported by its original developer because they have moved on to bigger, shinier and more profitable things we also lost that ability to log in here and they will not fix that.
As a result it became an unexpected and rapid project for us to move to a new solution.
The response to David’s appeal was fantastic and enabled us to organise new hosting with a new comment system. We’ve chosen WordPress and to use their comment system – which doesn’t require registration if you don’t wish to do so.
The new address is biasedbbc.tv
This will be the last post on the old Blogspot URL although the site will remain here as a reference.
Several things to bear in mind please:
The move to the new site has been rushed through because of the Google and Echo problems. There will be teething problems. Some things will not work straight away. I will be working on these constantly until they are resolved. Please email me with problems or use the Open Thread that I will set up on the new site for issue reporting but I will not be able to respond to everybody instantly or even maybe individually due to the number of comments that I anticipate. Also, technical issues will be given priority over cosmetic comments.
Important: I will not be able to import Comments from the previous site until next week. Please do not report missing past comments as an issue.
I want to say thank you especially to a friend of this blog and a friend of mine MaxFarquar for again designing the new blog graphics. Max did the design for the previous blog too – as a favour – and if you feel like popping over to his place and leaving a small thankyou in his Donation jar then I am sure it will be appreciated.
If you have any error reports, problems, issues, questions…email me here. I can’t guarantee to get back to you promptly because I’m expecting a busy few days pulling this all together but as always I’ll do my best to help.
AllSeeingEye
