Blogger stops working with Live Writer

I use Microsoft live Writer. I maintain a no. of blogs. One about tech, one about gadgets, one about religion and mythology, one about training my new pet "Boomerang" (a 2 month old yellow Labrador) and so on. So to manage all these blogs, I use live writer. It is pretty cool and dainty. It gives all word like features like spell check and text formatting, manages my photos, if I want to post one along with my Blog Post, and so on. One fine day I realize that one of my blogs on blogger doesn't post the blogs that I am posting through live writer.

After sniffing around a little I realize that it is the "Captcha" that I somehow need to put while posting my blogs. Since live writer isn't able to solve the "Captcha", it is not being able to post my blogs on that particular blog.

So I click on the link that says "Why do I have this? " and I find out that "Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog." and that "Since you are an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy and we sincerely apologise for this false positive."

Now I have absolutely no issues with Blogger thinking that my blog is a spam blog. And in fact I think they are doing a pretty good job trying to prevent spam.

I was just wondering why this happened and how this could be made a little more user friendly. It happened perhaps because I am using Live Writer, which is in a way an automated blog posting engine. Which is exactly what a spam blog would probably use. I think the Blogger Spam Bots are doing the right thing.

So going beyond this point, I started wondering if the live writer in some way could report the issue to the author. I am sure there must be some kind of exception thrown on the blogger side when I was trying to post the entry without solving the "Captcha". Why did live writer not inform me? is that a test case missing in the live writer code? Why does Live Writer give me the feeling that everything is fine and hunky dory? Or is it that there is no way to find out whether the blog has been posted successfully or not? Should I report this? Well what the hell I probably should.

Last but not the least, Blogger is smart enough to store all the posts that didn't solve the "Captcha" as draft. So all my work didn't go a waste. I just had to go to Blogger and solve the "Captcha" individually. I hate to admit it, but I have to appreciate good work when I see it... Even if it is from the "enemy camp" . Kudos Google...!!!

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 07, 2008
  In fact Writer is designed to handle the captcha error message from Blogger, as required by the GData documentation, and present the captcha prompt to the user. Blogger must not be returning that error message, I don't know why. We certainly wouldn't report that everything is fine if the post resulted in an error. I'll follow up with the Blogger team and get to the bottom of this--thanks!