I had the same trouble with the learnerblogs accounts a year ago. Once the Edublogs support went, they were peppered with adverts. The final straw came when a child received an extremely inappropriate spam comment. I always moderate comments, but it was just unfortunate that she logged into her blog and saw it before I had the chance to do that.

This happened at the weekend and it was so offensive, that I made the decision there and then to delete the blog (it was a panic reaction – I could have just disabled the comment function). I then spent hours making the children new edublogs accounts.

When I returned to school on Monday, I explained the situation to the children and then demonstrated how they could export their own learnerblogs data into their new Edublogs accounts. I also showed them how to activate the Akismet plugin and shared my wordpress API key with them.

A great worry now is that, although it’s possible to stop ads appearing in individual pupil blogs by adding them to a Supporter’s blog, there is no way to obtain the all important Akismet plugin for these blogs. Plugins are now only available to supporters.

Thank you very much for your kind offer to use your supporter status to de-advertise any blogs here. I might be in touch if I find we have some in need of rescuing!

Meanwhile, I’ve posted some basic self-hosting ‘how to’ ppts on my new blog, if you think that might be an option.

I agree with all of your points. An email warning would have been nice. Even then, I would have expected any ads to have been appropriate for an educational site. As you say, most folk only visit the forums when they have a problem, so they’re not lingering there to read all the posts from users who have come across these ads and are complaining.

It’s strange how some blogs are targetted more than others. I’ve spoken to a few teachers here who’ve set up free blogs recently with edublogs. Some are peppered with ads (lots of inappropriate ones) and others are completely ad-free – for now.

I’m fortunate enough to have a ’supporter’ class blog with space in it (I can add up to 30 other blog url’s) to ‘rescue’ those pupils, teachers and parents who are exposed to ads until we come up with an alternative sulution.

As for “only $39.95″ the fact that Edublogs doesn’t take purchase orders tells me they know that most teachers will pay out of their own pockets for things they want for their students, and decided to take financial advantage of that impulse.

I’m looking at classblogmeister here in the US and our tech folks are looking at in-house hosting.

Thanks for commenting. Like you, I’ve always been delighted with Edublogs free service and that’s why I had no hesitation recommending it to the LA.

In my new secondment post, however, i can’t take the chance of having inappropriate ads appearing – and I can’t recommend it as a free service if the only option is to become a supporter to guarantee safe use in education.

If I’d still been in class, I would probably, like you, be defending edublogs. But I’m having to look at things from a different perspective now.

I had absloutely no complaints about the service at edublogs until the unsafe ads began appearing. The good thing about all this is that I’m being forced to learn the art of self-hosting. I’d never have taken that step otherwise

I do envy the East Lothian set up!

It’s all starting to make more sense thanks to lots of help from David Gilmour, Sinclair McKenzie via email. Thank you, too, for recommending ilovethenet hosting service on twitter. Sinclair has just talked me through it on twitter and – hey presto!!

http://mvass.net/

I’m off now to try to change the theme and ply with plugins, etc.

Any further advice would be much appreciated

Difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org is that .org is the place to download wp for use on a host or your own server, .com is a hosted solution, using wordpress multiuser (wpmu) like edublogs with ads of some sort.
East Lothian are ahead as they run wpmu themselves.

I”ve never heard of Gail Desler (and wouldn’t begin to know how to contact her) but i’m sorry that you needed to get out of bed at 3 AM because she needed your urgent assistance!

I know how that feels, though, because I was up all night last night trying to figure out a way to remove the ads from the Primary 2 class blog before any more damage was done. Thank goodness I became an edublog supporter two years ago (I did it voluntarily when there was no pressure to do so – I wanted to show James that I appreciated the great free service)

After a ‘tossing and turning’ for most of the night, I realised that I could add the P 2 blog to the Carronshore blog and make them ad-free. It felt good to get to work and telephone the teacher to tell her that she could relax, too, because there would be no more horrible adult ads appearing on her six year olds’ class blog.

I hope I sleep tonight – I’m off now to check the other class blogs I’ve helped to set up since I came into post in August. I hope I get to any inappropriate ads before the families do