Most people already most likely know that Blogspot is a very good place for budding bloggers to start blogging for free. Blogger, originally created by Pyra Labs in 2001, was bought over by Google in 2003. It also owns all subdomains of blogspot.com.

Before aspiring bloggers begin using Blogger, they are required to first read and agree to the Blogger Terms of Service (“Terms of Service”) and the terms and conditions and policies, including any future amendments (collectively, the “Agreement”). Nonetheless, in actual reality, no one really reads the TOS before signing up for anything, much less a free blog service. Since, as mentioned, Blogger is a free service, users are able to freely communicate, express themselves and entitled to freedom of speech, or so it seems. There are certain rules that bloggers have to follow per se the requirements of Blogger.

Blogger has a Content Policy where certain elements published which are considered detrimental towards the browsing experience of users are flagged as offensive, hence forcing an interstitial page that says “Some readers of this blog have contacted Google because they believe this blog’s content is objectionable. In general, Google does not review nor do we endorse the content of this or any blog. For more information about our content policies, please visit the Blogger Terms of Service” before allowing viewers to access the main site.

This has indeed it’s pros and cons which is highly debatable. More notably, sites featuring pornography and obscenity are often victims of such. Among the criteria for a blog to trigger such action is the posting of the following elements that is listed in the Blogger’s Content Policy. Some might say that the introduction of such a page may stop search engines from indexing their site, thus crippling web traffic, which is rather harsh and unfair. But, bloggers must be held responsible for whatever they post.

While browsing for userscripts, I discovered a Javascript that allows you to bypass the ‘Blogger; Content Warning” page automatically. For this tutorial, I’ll be using Firefox, and notably Greasemonkey.

If you haven’t already installed Greasemonkey, you should first install it. For the benefit of others, Greasemonkey is a Firefox addon which allows users to install scripts to dramatically increase one’s browsing experience. On the Userscripts forum, members Michael Devore and groovyskies have both contributed to writing a simple script which bypasses the “Blogger: Content Warning” page.

Blogger Content Warning Autoskip II which is a revamped version of the previous obsolete script that has since been unable to work following the new page layout overhaul of Blogger.

// ==UserScript==
// @name Blogger Content Warning Autoskip II
// @namespace http://blogger.com/
// @include https://www.blogger.com/blogin.g?blogspotURL=*
// ==/UserScript==

var continueButton = document.getElementById('continueButton');
if (continueButton)
{
var oEvent = document.createEvent("MouseEvents");
oEvent.initMouseEvent("click", true, true, window, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, false, false, false, false, 0, null);
continueButton.dispatchEvent(oEvent);
}

Then install the script. You would then be prompted with a screen as shown below;

Select install, and upon successful installation, a message stating Blogger Content Warning Autoskip II has been installed successfully will be displayed on the status bar below.

Now you can view any of your favorite blogger sites without ever bothering about the annoying “Blogger: Content Warning” page anymore. Note that if you have NoScript installed prior to that, you’ve to allow scripts globally beforehand to make this work as this is basically a script. Keep in mind that most of this sites have such an interstitial page in place for a good reason. At the end of the day, you are responsible for whatever you view on the internet. I hope you all enjoyed the guest article. Please do leave a comment.

This is another great article written by xje4bv.

[tags]blogger, warning, content, greasemonkey, firefox[/tags]