Google (Blogger) is Already Disintegrating and It's a Reminder of the Great Dangers of Outsourcing Blogs to Companies (Including Automattic or WordPress.com)
Plus, Phoronix admits that using PHP - and not static pages - causes the Web site to be DDOSed (via Forums), sort of
A week ago (2024-12-31) the founders of the blog "The IPKat", which used to cover EPO corruption until Team Battistelli was blackmailing them, spoke of a Google "Blogger issue in posts published by Jeremy and Ilanah". Having spoken to the key people in the distant past (we're talking about nearly a decade ago!), I know more or less what happened and it's not shocking Jeremy stepped down after the EPO had kept pressuring him and his team. Apparently the problem is people talking about corruption, not the corruption itself. EU officials went out of their way to brush aside or ignore corruption at the EPO. This problem persists. It's merely destabilising the EU because this corruption is spreading into the EU, too.
Anyway, to summarise what "The IPKat" says ("Merpel McKitten" is just a pseudonym that can be anything or anybody, maybe even Jeremy and/or Ilanah), Google has its own self-serving plans for Blogger. Eventually it'll all die, just like Google+ and hundreds of other 'free' Google disservices, but for now it still exists, albeit with caveats. It looks like they try to 'consolidate' to save costs and reduce complexity, but at whose expense? The users', of course. This is how "Merpel McKitten" put it: (our guess is that it's Jeremy and/or Ilanah advised by some technical person, hence the pen name)
Any lessons learned? Maybe they should never have outsourced to Google or Blogger in the first place. Maybe it's almost too late now (to change), partly because the URLs cannot be made to redirect to some non-Google domain.
Live and learn.
Speaking of site issues, Phoronix seems to be belatedly 'upgrading' (paying for) vBulletin 6, which is proprietary software that has long run the 'comment section' of Phoronix. Why? Well, it turns out that using PHP bloatware is a pain in the butt. Phoronix already outsources traffic to stuff like Clownflare (a huge can of worms!), but that's apparently not enough when bots can devour many unique pages at the back end and pass arguments (bypassing cashes or CDNs). We know how agonising and time-wasting that can be because we too had this experience, especially with the wiki and WordPress.
Phoronix will need to pay again and again for proprietary software that hammers away at its hosting plan, making it more expensive or more of a nuisance to deal with.
Phoronix has vBulletin to thank for vendor lock-in and performance issues (maybe training some LLM out of 20 years' worth of "content"). No lessons learned from vBulletin's Canonical/Ubuntu affair? This goes more than 20 years back. Canonical chose proprietary software for Ubuntu Forums the same year the company (and Phoronix) was born. Having installed phpBB that year (on my own site), I know it was sufficiently mature at the time, albeit years later (around 2007) it would have a severe security hole that was broadly exploited. That's the cost of bloated PHP things, even if they're Free software. As recently as a month ago I had to deal with PHP related issues in software I installed 20 years ago. Some Chinese IP addresses misused a feedback form to send loads of spam. We mitigated, but it still took several hours to diagnose and properly tackle.
What's the conclusion of all this? Be wary of what TypePad or WordPress.com or any of those 'free' (or even paid) "plans" will turn into. Automattic resorted to a power grab [1, 2]. Medium and SubStack also mean you're not in control but at someone else's mercy. It won't end well. In the case of Social Control Media, many failed to heed the warning of Twitter/X and simply flocked to some other trap, typically proprietary like BlueSky.
There's a better way.
"Static websites are all the rage these days," N3wjack wrote some days ago, "and I get it. They are fast, secure, low maintenance and future-proof."
We're already done all this and left the burden (or technical debt) behind. This year we're implementing draft functionality in our SSG. We can focus on the code, less on system administration (like responding to abuse of PHP from the 'naked' Web). We can also spend more time writing and curating news. █