Private Blog Exposed?

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  1tess · Moderator Emeritus · Aug 16, 2008 at 12:43 am

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  According to this post (on a site I often read,) it appears that people who use Google reader can sometimes access private blogs on WordPress by way of its “recommendations” function. Has anyone else heard of this happening?
  Here is the link to the post:
  http://monsterflower.blogspot.com/2008/08/exposed.html

  Are private blogs really private if Google opens up access to them?

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  teck07 · Member · Aug 16, 2008 at 12:54 am

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  Here is the FAQS About Privacy

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  tellyworth · Staff · Aug 16, 2008 at 1:22 am

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  I posted a comment on that blog.

  Private WordPress.com blogs are only accessible by users who are on the membership list and who are logged in. Private blogs do not have feeds.

  There’s not enough information to know for sure but I think this was a blog that previously was public, that the owner later changed to private. Someone subscribed to the blog with Google Reader while it was public and used the Recommend function.

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  1tess · Moderator Emeritus · Aug 16, 2008 at 2:33 am

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  tellyworth,
  Thank you much!

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  jgstreed · Member · Aug 18, 2008 at 7:59 pm

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  All of this raises the musical question: how do I allow authorized users (contributors) to subscribe to the private blog I maintain? My research so far (about an hour’s worth, I’ll admit) suggests I cannot use the RSS feed, nor can I use the “subscribe-to-comments” plug-in (because I do not have WordPress downloaded to my server). Is there a way to have a hosted blog provide the subscribe-to feature? My contributors would like to have some notice arrive in their e-mail boxes.

  Thanks from a newbie!

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  mark · Member · Aug 18, 2008 at 9:13 pm

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  http://feedblitz.blogspot.com/2008/08/new-feature-newsletters-from-protected.html

  Should help?