Gotten any malware warning messages lately?

Some people have recently seen malware warning notices whenever they access any blog that contains a blogroll (or link list) sponsored by BlogRolling. Among the blogs that have been affected are two blogs belonging to 1389AD, namely 1389 Blog and 1389 Message Blog.

You may be relieved to know that the security alerts are a false alarm. I have since moved the Blogrolling link lists to a separate page, so that the messages will not come up when readers attempt to access blog posts.

If you own or administer a blog or website that displays a link list via BlogRolling, you will need to be aware of this. Malware warning notices can frighten and upset visitors to your blog, even if the notices are bogus.

BlogRolling may disappear soon

After being told about this, I visited the BlogRolling News & Status page. Here’s what I found:

Update on BlogRolling

SAT SEP 18th, 2010

We’re aware that there is an issue with BlogRolling blogrolls causing some browsers to display a security warning.

There’s nothing really wrong with BlogRolling itself but the way we connect your blog to the sites in your blogroll makes some security algorithms think there is.

If you find yourself in this situation, we recommend you remove the Blogrolling code from your site.

We’re probably going to be shutting the service down soon. We’ll post more information here and on our Twitter account (@blogrolling) as we decide on next steps.

We’re hoping we can give you enough time to get any data you need out of your blogrolling account before we shut down, but if you really need that data, you might want to get it now just in case.

Why aren’t we just fixing it and letting you continue using the service?

BlogRolling has largely been on auto-pilot for the last six months or so. The people who built it for us don’t work for us anymore. Even though it doesn’t make us any money, we wanted to keep it running because we know folks like it. But we’re not really comfortable with the code causing security warnings and that means it’s probably time for the service to end.

Thanks for your support. Stay tuned for more details in the next few days.

What to do?

If you are using BlogRolling to manage your blogrolls or link lists, you will need to get your links out of BlogRolling and put them somewhere else for safekeeping. As far as I know, there is no easy way to do this.

• As an emergency measure for making a rudimentary backup of your links, you can login to your BlogRolling account, then click the link to “My BlogRolls” if that page is not already visible, then click “Get BlogRolling Code” on your blogroll.

  Then scroll down to the “RSS” subheader, click to select the code. Copy and paste the URL into your favorite RSS feed reader, just as you would do with any new feed subscription. If you don’t already have a feed reader, you can use Google Reader.

• You can also select “Add/Edit Links” for the desired blogroll, then use your browser menu to Select All and Copy each page of links. Paste each page of links into a text file, using Notepad or something similar.

After that, if you want your links to be available to readers on your blog, you will have to re-enter them into whatever widget your blogging software provides for managing link lists. Unless someone decides to provide some software for automating this, it will be a time-consuming and arduous task. I have nearly a thousand links in BlogRolling at this point, so I expect it to take me awhile.

Previously published on 1389 Blog.