Wednesday, January 4, 2017

Error 400: Blogger is Bloggered

If you tried to post a comment and got the scary message:
Bad Request
Error 400
please read below the fold for an explanation and a work-around.

This problem appeared on many Blogger blogs at the end of October, and has collected a lot of reports on the Blogger Help Forum. It is a really annoying problem but, in two months after replicating the problem, Google has made exactly zero progress fixing it. Which sucks.

The problem is that, at least for me and many others, 100% of the time publishing a comment after previewing it gets "Bad Request Error 400". Publishing a comment without previewing it works. So what I'm forced to do is:
  • Click "Post a comment".
  • Write the comment.
  • Select the whole comment and copy it to the clipboard.
  • Click "Preview".
  • Click "Publish", get "Bad Request Error 400".
  • Left-click on the "Back" button, choose the post in which you were commenting, before you clicked "Post a comment".
  • Click "Post a comment".
  • Paste the comment from the clipboard.
  • Click "Publish" - do NOT click "Preview".
It is really unacceptable that for the last two months we have been reduced to this level of bogosity.

[Updated 1/24/17 to clarify which "Back" option should be clicked]

4 comments:

David. said...

The Blogger Help Forum claims that the problem is fixed. But I just tried to comment on this post in a Chromium browser in which I had cleared all browsing data, and I got "Bad Request: Error 400". So it still isn't fixed.

David. said...

There's another rumor that a fix has been pushed. If this comment appears, then it has finally been.

David. said...

Yay! The rumored fix works!

David. said...

Atrios sums up my feelings:

"Blogger keeps trying to push their new version on me and it is, unsurprisingly, worse and more confusing and more prone to make dumb stuff happen.

As far as I can tell it doesn't even claim to do anything better than the old system. It's just like "this new internet, man, gotta be big and bloated and more complicated and take longer and screw things up more because that's progress."

I'm now composing posts by writing raw HTML in vi in a terminal window then pasting the result into new Blogger's HTML pane.