Crap happens. Mistakes can be made, systems can fail. If more than an apology what?

If you take the risk of putting things on here you don't want people to read then there is always the possibility that they will be accessible.

Do you know all the 117 people that you have as friends?

You are right. These things shouldn't happen but - crap does happen.

I spose it's a tricky one, a line of code breaks, a new function decides to conflict with an old one.

If an apology is seen as not enough, what is enough? As with all technical things quite often all you can do is say "sorry, the computers messed up". It's not anyone's fault and was at least fixed quickly.

If you don't mind me saying BCUK didn't exactly slap the horses on the arse, to keep the analogy as soon as they saw the problem they came and slammed the door shut.

The problem, to be honest, in my mind became exacerbated when wherever you looked people were posting about the problem and advertising it was there, I think other bloggers slapped the horses on the arse and even could have opened the gates wider.

Don't get me wrong, I understand it was a huge glitch which may have caused difficulties for people, but as to how complicit the blog-owners are in a wider breach of trust thing is arguable when it wasn't a deliberate action on their part.

Yours,

The Suddenly Unliked One

I only think an apology is enough because I can't think of anything else they can do. It would be nice to think there was some form of compensation available, and I don't just mean in monetary terms, but there isn't or won't be... I don't think.

See, I feel like a bit of twat for announcing it so royally, as AJ pointed out, probably wasn't the best move and to start with I thought 'well yes, so maybe BCUK should have emailed us all to tell us so we could have gone in a deleted things' but that would have been the same as what I did.

Before I commented on AJ's blog that an apology was enough I did think 'well what else should they do' but of all the options I came up with it still kept coming back to the fact that they can't afford to do any of them or don't have them time.

They could give EVERYONE Pro accounts but look at how many blogs are spam or have two or three entries on them. They could give everyone a free month but the logistics of that are immense.

I appreciate the harm it could have/will have caused but I honestly can't see anything else they could do other than apologise. I do think maybe an apology on the main screen would have been better as not everyone looks at the developer blog.

At the end of the day accidents happen, it was unfortunate, but it's too late to do anything about it.

You have made some interesting points. People's private thoughts and feelings are just as important as bank account details - a site that allows private information to be displayed needs to take that into account.

As I have said on another post, I think the site's administrators should have taken the site down as soon as they got wind of something like this happening. I don't think anyone would have complained.

Just my thoughts,
Hektor

I personally do not post anything on here that I don't want people to read. What is the point, otherwise? I have exactly one post on here that was private and that was about Paddy's birthday when I asked for help finding something. So no biggy for me. I have been carefull-ish not to let friends and family in the real world know about it, so it's unlikely that they will read - and I don't often slag them off anyway!

But I appreciate that some people do want some stuff kept private, your blog is notorious, and I know people at your work read it, and I can only imagine suddenly having everything laid bare. Potentially disastrous, as you pointed out. The thing is, nothing is infallible. I can imagine Google search accidentally being able to search people's Google emails all too easily! A properly motivated person would probably be able to access your email anyway! Such is the world we live in. If you are really so worried, go back to sending letters through the post! (but the postman could intercept them...)

This blog site is better than any other I have played with, and personally I wouldn't give up on it because an "improvement" had an unexpected side-effect, which was remedied as soon as possible. As Paddy sais, an appypollylogie on the main page would have been good, but there you go.

Perhaps rather than "move", you could create a secret second blog, like so many people seem to do, and just invite those friends you choose to show private posts to. Needs no mention of the Jizzzmeister brand, so a search wouldn't find it, just remember to reply to comments from the right account!

Is it fixed?
I'm about to delete EVERYONE from my friends list, so let me know soonest please.

As I have said on several blogs I dont do friends only posts, but respect those that do.

As everyone else has said a glich is just that a Glich, BCUK were darn quick in fixing it too, would other sites have been that quick?

The many messages going round about it probably peeked more peoples interest than the actual event did to be honest, and there were probably more friends only posts read because of it.

Leaving may seem like the answer right now, because you are angry. But to be homest this could have happened on any site, and this one so far had been the friendliest and most communal I have found.

Your decision of course, just calm down first.

Those situations you spoke of in yer post - jeez! I was thinking about all those too. One of my friends was being stalked and I worried about the stalker having access to their info and a few other bloggers situations which would be too obvious to say here.

I don't think there's anything they can do to compensate. They came back to work to fix it when they got the freaked-out emails at home. It really was a major fuck-up but it wasn't deliberate and I don't think it was down to crappy writing skills either. It just happens to have been a mash-up in a very dodgy area. Mibbe not enough testing, since security is all?

Please don't leave the site, J x

I found everything said above interestinng and relevant.

I am not sure sorry is enough, but what else can they do?

they have to make sure it does not happen again though.

Was there negligence? Does the e-contract specify a duty of care in respect of private posts, or is there an implied duty of care? Was the problem reasonably foreseeable? What are the actual losses sustained by those who have private posts (and that includes me), and are they quantifiable?

It's a long time since I was in the business, but I don't reckon there's a claim under tort of negligence in English law, even provided the membership e-contract falls under UK jurisdiction (and I didn't check, did you?).

Accidents will happen.

An apology would be nice though!

Well I know of at least one blogger for whom the consequences have been plenty serious - and the whole point of a Friends Only post is that you can keep it private. If you have a malicious stalker who then e:mails private posts to someone else - sheesh!

im just i deleted all my stuff i didnt want prying eyes to see the other week

*phew wipes sweat from brow*

ps

dont leave

Some kind of apology would be good, but not so sure what else they could do. They can't take back what, if anything, people have seen.

Don't leave the site though. This could easily have happened on another site. Technology's technology after all.

Here's my tu'pence for what it's worth.

In this day and age there are many ways to communicate.

Everyone uses their online journals for anything they want which is absolutely the way it should be, all good, live and let live, etc etc.

One use for this site seems to be as a little online communal support group. Now there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I've dipped in to it from time to time myself and I love some of you very much. BUT essentially you are publishing some incrediably deep and personal things on an INTERNET BASED FORUM where you must surely accept that this type of thing might happen! Especially when the site is still (STILL!) Beta testing.

If you don't want the entire world to know about how much you really don't like your wife, kids or anything else (that in all honesty perhaps you should be discussing with either a professional or those people who you actually, you know, live with) then get the email addresses of people you want to share with and email them, organise meeting up for coffee or pick up the phone... SURELY?

If you publish things on a website which you don't want other people to read, private post or otherwise, you have to take some responsibility for the medium in which YOU choose to share that info. All blog.co.uk can and should be responsible for is fixing the problem asap, which they did.

And in other thoughts, I completely agree with AJ that you all just made it a million times worse by posting about it increasing attention. Jesus, everyone in MY office knows what happened and no one even blogs here. If you'd all communicated via a different medium we would never have noticed.

So guys, take a bit of responsibility perhaps?

software is software and it sometimes goes wrong (heaven knows, I've made some garganutan programming fuck ups in my time) when you least want it to.

This place is connected to the the internet. a billion people a day could drop by. I think its easy to forget the goldfish bowl this place really is..so maybe its worth remembering this before writing down every little detail...

I missed the action too, Juzzzy, but caught on to it while the situation was still in full swing, so I went and 'drafted' all of my friends-only posts just to be sure. I still have the posts, but they aren't online anymore.

I have to say, I am fortunate in the fact that all of my friends-only posts (which, you may recall, were private and personal) were over a year old and written at a very troubled and lonely period in my life when my blog friends really were the only ones I could vent to. I doubt if yesterday anyone took the time to read back that far in the hope of finding something personal on my blog, but that's not really the point - the fact is they could have done if they'd wanted to.

Like a fool I keep my blog titled with my own name, a remnant from its original purpose of charting my travels for the benfit of those at home. The repercussion is, of course, that my blog is easily identifiable, and there is no doubt who wrote it. I've thought of changing it a few times in the past, but that's not as easy as it sounds and would mean losing months and months of posts in the process. My blog even turns up on Google if people are searching for information on me and my work, and I know that you and I share the situation of having colleagues from the real world read our blogs. I recall last year, for example, when the mother of one the kids from my summer training programme left a comment saying how much her child had enjoyed the week - a lovely sentiment, and nice to hear, but why the hell did she leave it on my blog of all places? My company has a web site of its own, and my blog was never mentioned in front of the kids!

Anyway, the point I am making is that friends-only posts are an obvious solution to this problem for me - I can retain a public blog and still talk candidly to you lot if I need to. But I now know that the friends-only post feature is unreliable - I certainly wouldn't trust it now, particularly if I wanted to share something personal with my good blog friends that I didn't want the general blogging community to know about. Others have commented here that by writing in a public forum we must take responsibility for the chance that our words might be read by those other than the intended - I disagree. It's Blog.co's responsibility to keep my private posts private because they offered me this facility in the first place. If Blog.co simply offered a public forum then, yes - the responsibilty for what I write would be my own. But if Blog.co offers a friends-only facility, they have to stand by it, and the responsibility for it is theirs. My trust is placed with them.

Others have also commented here that bloggers themselves exacerbated the problem by mentioning it online. Again, I disagree. If Paddy, for example, hadn't brought the matter to my attention, I still wouldn't know anything about. I say thank you to Paddy. I'm glad I wasn't waiting for Blog.co to tell me about it - as it was they weren't quick enough to close the site down and they weren't smart enough to make sure it didn't happen in the first place. They still haven't even apologised as far as I am concerned. I'm sorry, but posting an apology on a web site that you have to follow a link to from the Help page is not sufficient. Apologise in big letters on the home page of the site that fucked up in the first place, and in front of those whose trust you need to win back. Fuck that, e-mail us all personal apologies. When will they realise that they have to make ammends to regain trust, and do something proactive to re-establish a relationship with their clients? What they've done so far is tantamount to a child apologising very quietly with its head bowed in the hope that it doesn't have to sound sincere.

I do happen to believe that an apology is sufficient, if for the only reason that there's nothing else they can do, but I don't think that an apology has even come close to being made yet. And I don't think it's every blogger's own fault for blogging in the first place. Blog.co offered us the friends-only service, and it fucked up. They either need to fix it once and for all and guarantee it as a function, or get rid of it.

And they need to apologise here, in front of all of us.

I'm not going anywhere - I like it here and I like my friends here. I'm not sure I could trust anywhere else any more than I can trust this place. 'Better the devil you know' as they say. I don't think you should go either (or to put it another way, I don't want you to go) but you're right to feel cross and we are right to expect an apology. 'Codes clashing and updates conflicting' means nothing to me, all I know is that however difficult running this site is, they made the mistake. So let them apologise, let us accept the apology and their assurances for the future, and then let us all move on, together.

That can really only happen, though, if they apologise to begin with.

Rant over.

X

Among the apologies that we as a team owe members of BCUK, please allow me to first apologise for the rather late comment
(we will apologise directly to members of BCUK via email later today and tomorrow).

Among all things, we rushed to fix the bug first.
The private posts were available to other members logged in at that point in time (note: they were not public in the general sense and were therefore not indexed by search engines). We did fix the bug within a few hours, identified the source of the problem and got rid of it.

It´s hard to express how the team felt after everything was put back into place - we were quite shattered to say the least. Needless to say, having private posts available to strangers is a very serious issue and one which cannot be compensated for. We completely agree that this is not "some programming glitch". It did erase a lot of trust. And it is up to us to prove that we have learned from this and it is up to us to win back the trust you´ve put in us.

We cannot undo this mistake. We can only promise to try our utmost to improve and not allow things like this to happen again. As a matter of fact, we are already increasing test times, test-teams, as well as support staff.

We deeply apologise for this incident and thank everybody for their participation regarding this matter, be it supportive or critical.

You can be assured that this matter did have a very strong impact on all of us and we will do our very best to improve.