Thursday, February 7, 2019

Regarding Google's recent policy changes

Since I opened this blog site in 2013, I have been feeling thrilled to receive great attention from hackers and DIYers. There had been many great discussions in the comment sections. Personally, I have learned a lot, and I think many visitors benefited from the comments as well!

It is unfortunate that Google is going to permanently close its Google+ service, which is having a painful impact on this blog site.

Yesterday, I was astonished to find that all the comments under my blog posts have been deleted because they were all Google+ comments. I looked at the recent policy change and found the following message:

"Following the announcement of Google+ API deprecation scheduled for March 2019, a number of changes will be made to Blogger’s Google+ integration on 4 February 2019. 

Google+ Comments: Support for Google+ comments will be turned down, and all blogs using Google+ comments will be reverted back to using Blogger comments. Unfortunately, comments posted as Google+ comments cannot be migrated to Blogger and will no longer appear on your blog. "

So basically, all the old comments are removed!

It is definitely a big loss to me and visitors to this blog. The good thing is that Google is not closing blogspot, and people can still leave comments as a Google user, not a Google+ user.

I have been trying to download my Google+ archive, which does include some old comments. But they are very unstructured. If anyone has found a solution to add the old comments back, please leave a comment!