This is a relatively new Xanga thing. The awful writer who complains that the Nicktion crowd keeps ruining all his book sales on Lulu.com has rated one of his Xangas "explicit." Sure he swears a blue streak, but it means that in order to copy and paste from one of his entries onto my own Xanga, I couldn't do it from within Feedreader 3.0, and had to rate my own blog there "explicit" as well, to read/quote from his.

Well this is ridiculous, because Xanga now treats every post I make there as if it were x-rated. I feel really bad that someone I know (an aspiring writer, but she's still in high school) was unable to comment on my entry and got all ticked off about it. Being able to comment on a blog that's rated explicit requires credit card confirmation, although she could read it, after working her way through quite a clickstream, which makes no sense to me.

She could read, but not comment? She posted about her frustration on her own Xanga, and I ended up apologizing to her and changing my settings back to the default. My own entry was just a cross-post of the entry about frogs, and the worst thing I said was that a bullfrog will piss on you if you grab it. Piss is a four-letter word, but it certainly isn't a swear. There's no reason to rate every entry of mine as being explicit just because I wanted to quote from someone else who rated their own Xanga explicit.

This is fairly typical of Xanga's powers that be. It introduced an RSS feed, and set the default for all users to enable the feature; I had to manually go in and disable it. As it is, I restrict my readership to a limited list of registered Xangans, and don't make my entries there public. Why not just make the feature available, announce its availability, and allow users to enable it if they wish?

Xanga really dropped the ball with its introduction of that feature. I discovered that some creepy woman in the SF Bay area who used to harass me on an orchid forum several years ago had grabbed a feed of my blog there within a couple of days of the feature being enabled by the administrators. She signed on with a fake name and signed my guestbook, asking to be put on my restricted reader list (request denied), so she must have thought it was her lucky day when she could just grab an RSS feed instead (not that she could read a resticted post, regardless). I put the kibosh on that pretty quickly. Two months later, she's still trying to grab feeds every hour, but she can't read anything I post. I admit it's amusing to observe all the footprints she leaves trying, but you'd think she would have caught on by now. She can't read any entries there even if she logs in manually and tries. Some people. What a maroon.