My issues with the Blogger Nav-Bar

Although many Blogger's prefer to hide the nav-bar, I have kept mine in place for two main reasons:

1. I blog about Blogger, and the nav-bar is a clear indication that my blogs are powered by Blogger.
2. I find it very useful to have the "New post", "Customize" and "Dashboard" links available when editing my blogs.

Today I did a little experiment with the nav-bar, and now I'm seriously wondering whether this feature should be installed on any blog at all...

The Blogger nav-bar gives readers the option to view random blogs by clicking on the "next blog" link. In theory, this would be a great way to read the blogs of others, perhaps to discover a blogging treasure you may not otherwise have seen. So as a little experiment, I decided to flick through a few random blogs in this manner and greet some of the other bloggers I encountered.

However, I was rather disappointed (and somewhat shocked) to find that over half of the blogs I encountered were "adult" themed blogs. By this, I'm sure you'll understand the type of content I mean...

I consider myself to be open minded, and if people do want to publish adult content then that's up to them.

BUT:

• Anyone above the age of thirteen can create a blog, and there are no age restrictions on who can read a blog. So what is there to protect children from seeing this type of content?
• I don't want my blogs to be associated with spam/pornography! As I'm sure no other decent blogger does either!

Sure we can flag a blog to tell Blogger about the objectionable content we find, but what real difference will this make, unless Blogger can employ thousands to hunt down each and every splog to restrict the content?

Hide the nav-bar?

As I explained in this post, Blogger does not explicitly demand that its users retain the nav-bar. Indeed, when Ankit questioned the legality of hiding the Blogger nav-bar, he was told there there are no restrictions on doing this.

While I have the option of hiding the nav-bar, I wish there were no need to do this, as there are still benefits of using this. It would be far preferable if Blogger could offer the option not to include the "next blog" link, or provide optional restrictions of what can be accessed in the same manner as a Google "safe" search.

I would love to read your opinions on this issue, so please leave your comments below. For those of you who wish to restrict the content which can be accessed from your blogs, here is a working method to hide the Blogger nav-bar.

Technorati Tags: blogger | nav+bar | restricted | content | splog | spam