A Blogger's Bad Karma

Sometimes I think that as a blogger, I'm just snake-bit.

My original hand-coded blog eventually enhanced with HaloScan comments (don't you miss 'em?), I retired when it was clear that HaloScan was about to be replaced with a paid service, which I always called "JK-Shit".

At that point, I moved to a Blogger blog. JK-Shit gave me about 10 days' notice that it planned to fuck me over, and that 10 day period included Christmas and New Year's.

So I set up this Blogger blog, and rocked along with it for not even quite a year (??) before Google suffered The Great Crash. I don't know about other Blogger bloggers, but I actually lost posts in that one. I wasn't happy about that.

So I girded my loins for battle and created a somewhat similar WordPress blog. This was my third blog in two years (??), and I wasn't very happy about another move. But I did it. WordPress had some distinct advantages and a couple of disadvantages (e.g., ads silently prepended to the comment areas of posts, ads not visible to the logged-in owner). Still, it wasn't bad.

Then this morning at about 2:00 AM CT, WordPress did the equivalent of the political Friday Night News Dump. They disabled my blog, alleging a violation of Terms of Service. WTF? I wasn't doing anything I hadn't seen other bloggers doing on WordPress dozens of times. And if, as one of their messages implied but did not say, they thought I had created some sort of "link farm" or whatever it's called to tweak the search engine stats, they can go suck eggs. I use a lot of links, but the only entity that could mistake my posts for spam is a 'bot unverified by any human backup.

I registered my ire... politely, because they can do ANYTHING they want to... in two civilly worded messages early today. But I doubt this matter will be resolved in my favor. People who set up systems of that kind are like preachers who involve parishioners in programs of abuse to "purify" them: they're absolutely certain they are right, and nothing will make them change their minds.

So I am preparing myself for a permanent (?) move back to Blogger; this is a start. Thanks for your patience and wish me luck.

BTW, I'm using a backup of the blogroll that is about 3 weeks old. If you were on the previous roll, and are not on this one, please email me at my usual blog email of dogge~relist~@~stephenb~~ates.com, with the tildes removed.