New year, old problems

This year has barely begun, and already old problems are repeating. Fortunately, none of them are my fault, but that fact doesn’t make them any less annoying. Worse, there’s very little I can do about the problems, and what I can do isn’t a good option. Complicated stuff, and barely into the year.

Yesterday, I posted my first blog post of the year, one that talked, in part, about the “Y2K Bug”. That caused a big problem for me, one that requires a bit of a back story.

There’s a Google-supplied sharing bar at the bottom at the bottom of all my blog posts, making it easy to share a post by email, to “re-blog” it to Blogger, or to share it on Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest. I’ve used this for a very long time to share my blog posts to Facebook, but they made some changes at some point, adding a “Send Message” button to whatever post I share, and that goes to what appears to be an AI chatbot, for some unknown reason. Even worse, the ENTIRE Facebook post is a link to that Messenger chat thing (sample at right). In other words, it makes sharing posts this way utterly pointless.

I was first alerted to the problem by a subscriber to the AmeriNZ Facebook Page. When I clicked on the link, it worked fine, but it turns out that’s because I was using the page as AmeriNZ, not as myself. I started including a direct link to my blog post in the comments, and that seemed to work well—until last night when the new problem appeared.

Last night I shared my blog post as usual, and then I left the direct link in the comments on Facebook, as usual. Later, I opened Facebook and there was a Notification from Facebook telling me they’d removed my comment because, it said, “This goes against our Community Standards on Spam.” WTF?! As always, my comment had a direct link to the same thing I was sharing to the page.

Naturally, I read what they were referring to:

We don't allow people to use misleading links or content to trick people to visit, or stay on, a website.

Examples of things that we don't allow

• Telling people that they must like a Page to access content on another site
• Using irrelevant pop-ups on websites to prevent people from leaving easily
• Disguising a link as something on our platform, such as a poll or video, to get clicks

Obviously none of that was remotely relevant to me sharing a link to my blog post in a comment. So, I clicked on “read the full policy”, and it was just as irrelevant to this situation:

We do not allow content that is designed to deceive, mislead or overwhelm users in order to artificially increase viewership. This content detracts from people's ability to engage authentically on our platforms and can threaten the security, stability and usability of our services. We also seek to prevent abusive tactics, such as spreading deceptive links to draw unsuspecting users in through misleading functionality or code, or impersonating a trusted domain.

Most (I suspect all…) comment moderation on Facebook is done by bots and algorithms, so I had a hunch I was just another victim of technology, and I was right. I clicked on “How we made this decision” and read: “Our technology found that your content doesn't follow our Community Standards,” it said. “As a result, our technology took action.” Their “technology” means no human had anything to do with it, which was obvious, of course.

As usual, there was no way to appeal their decision, and there are no actual humans to contact (apparently if I pay to become “verified”, which would give me a blue checkmark, it might be possible to reach a human). So, there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.

My next step was to try to remove the message option from posts, but that doesn’t seem to be possible. After the better part of an hour clicking various settings, including on the Meta for Business part that provides no way to go back to ordinary page administration (I had to close the tab, open a new one and launch the Facebook Page again), I found nothing. Facebook is notorious for putting controls for various settings in weird and illogical places, but it could just be that they don’t permit that.

So, the only option I have is to stop using the share button and copy and past the link directly in a post on the Facebook Page (that’s also my only option for sharing podcast episodes). I have no idea whether Facebook’s “technology” will allow me to do that, but if it doesn’t the AmeriNZ Facebook Page will be useless to me, and I may as well delete it.

Meanwhile, another problem has resurfaced with my podcast: Folks clicking links are blocked by their web browser due to a supposedly missing or expired “security certicate”. I set that up only a few weeks ago when Roger Green alerted me to the problem. In fact, I was getting it on Chrome, too, but coupld click a few times to get the part where I could tell Chrome to let me do what I want on the Internet. However, Safari on my iPad wouldn’t let me override it, and it prevented me from accessing the site or use any direct link to a post. When I added the security certificate, all of that stopped—for me, anyway.

The podcast site is currently hosted by Go Daddy, and I’m sick of the constant problems and how difficult it is to navigate their systems to fix them—although, if I used it a lot, like if I was a web developer, or something, it might be easier; I need to do something on it maybe once or twice a year. This is an open project at the moment.

Finally, a problem that took me awhile to identify: I wasn’t able to do certain things because I have a VPN (Virtual Private Network). I originally got it last January, just before my trip to Fiji with the family, because I knew Internet access was through wifi, and there’s no way of knowing how secure such things are. The VPN I chose, like most others, allow me to include all my devices, and while I mainly wanted it for my phone and iPad, I realised it could useful for things like watching news videos that are geoblocked. It worked great in Fiji, but then we came home.

I would try to access some websites and be refused access, something that sometimes happens, but I assumed it was just a glitch. On a whim, really, I switched off the VPN and I could access the sites. Similarly, I use an FTP program called to upload my podcasts to my site, and the one I use is called Cyberduck, something I used for years for work, too. Earlier this year, I started having trouble connecting to the server so I couple upload my podcast files: It would be very slow to login, then to access the folders on my site so I could upload my file, and then the upload would often fail, sometimes many times. I wasn’t suspicious because there were somewhat similar problems sometimes in the past, so it didn’t surprise me that there were glitches using it—ones that Nigel fixed for me, of course. I eventually started logging in through Go Daddy’s website, because even though it was much slower using a web browser, at least it worked.

When I resumed podcasting in early December, I and ran into the same problem using Cyberduck. Then, on a hunch more than a whim, I paused my VPN, and Cyberduck worked perfectly—fast login, fast access to the folder I needed, and VERY fast upload—all exactly as it should be, and how it was before I installed the VPN.

What all of these problems have in common is that at first I didn’t realise what was wrong, for different reasons. Once I worked out what was going on, I tried solutions for Facebook and for people to access to my podcast site, only to discover find out the solutions weren’t as simple as they seemed. Of all of those, only the problem using Cyberduck was easy to fix, and it’s remained fixed.

In a year in which I had very little room in my head to try and figure out complicated technical things, especially on top of everything else that was going on, it’s not a surprise that the problems took as long to work out as they did, and also why some of them didn’t work. Still this is new year, with, I hope, some new perspectives that can lead to new solutions.

Still, this certainly is what I wanted to wrestling with on the New Year’s Public Holidays—or any other day, actually. This is one of those times where, “it is what it is.” Onward! I hope…