Congratulations! Your Blog is Dead!!!
I get up in the morning and try to log onto a Wordpress blog I have been writing since 2007 and find I am locked out. And since they are all away on vacation I have no way to find out what is going on.
In truth, it is best that they are all on vacation. That way I do not maintain false hope that I will be reinstated and get access to my old files. As the saying goes: I have been thrown out of finer places than this. I sometimes think that getting locked out of my internet accounts is the only thing I do particularly well. When I got locked out of my Yahoo address I lost at least a decade of information.
There are many lessons to be learned. Perhaps the clearest is: Don’t do what I do and you should be fine. I don’t hear of lots of others being given the dreaded: “You have violated the terms of service” message so It must be something “special” I’m doing.
Given the generic warnings that Wordpress gives I am thinking the computer generated lockout likely came from one of three sources.
The first was, I posted a number of links to free calendar sites for people who want to get free calendars. Yes, I know that getting stuff for free is now a federal offense and helping others get free stuff is aiding and abetting. Oh the humanity!!! There is one main thing to avoid here should you try to help people get free calendars and free food by posting links to freebie sites, as I did. I would go search for new links and post them and I would add the older links from my older postings to the bottom of the newer post. Near as I can tell, it was the reposting of the older postings to the same site that likely made the Wordpress computers think I was doing something nefarious they have looking to lock folks out. Rather than search out those old links again, I reposted them.
Other possible lockout bait was that idiot who for the past week has been trying really hard to spam all my pages with comment spam. He didn’t even try to hide what he was doing so I could tell it was the same guy. Some websites don’t care why some bad actor is trying to hit you, they figure you did something or are doing something to cause it and they lock you out on general principles.
Another thing that some computer program might have used to lock me out is Kim Kardashian. I getting a lot of activity on another website where I have a Kardashian post. I noticed that I was suddenly getting thousands of hits. The cause was probably that naughty tweet Kim sent out on Christmas Eve but that busy post pointed directly back to a posting on Wordpress. Again, depending on who was clicking through from the original posting to Wordpress, if the computer program does not like the URLs of the incoming posts, and there are enough of them, the activity can be judged to be suspicious.
So you see why you want computers to judge, jury and executioner? They don’t care what is causing the “bad thing” to be bad. They only care who seems to be around the bad thing.
So besides never doing what I do, what is the moral of the story? Leave the Kardashians alone? No that’s not it. I had recently posted something about Ron Paul on Wordpress. Leave Ron Paul alone? No, that’s not it either.
Remember that when you post something on the web, you are using someone else’s computer. The don’t have to have a good reason to block you and block access to all your stuff. From your point of view, they can do it for no reason at all and make something up. This is particularly true since they often don’t specifically detail what it was they did not like. If you want to keep whatever it is you are writing, save it on your own computer hard drive first. That way, at least you don’t lose your history.
When I think about it, I suppose I knew the end was near. I recently saw that Wordpress was going to offer advertising of some kinds of some blogs. I deliberately avoided that advertising thinking that I would be free of whatever new restrictions that would bring. Famous last words.
When eHow changed hands all my stuff got removed from there—they were nice about it mind you.
When Buskisa changed policy I could no longer post anything I liked. In fact, the only things that seem to past muster in Bukisa any more are things with no links whatsoever.
I created a single posting on some blogging outfit in the UK and I was judged unfit for human consumption and my account was destroyed immediately! They do not serve my kind on that site.
I got myself destroyed on some site called Thoughts once. I think that one was called by free url submission website I used to use. They submitted websites to foreign search engines as well as English language search engines. I think now that some of those foreign “Search engines” were not on the up and up. They probably paid people to make it appear they had more traffic than they did.
Associated Content has been bought out by Yahoo so I expect to have content removed from there. With any luck, they will do it like eHow where they give you plenty of notice and tell you if you want to resubmit under their strict new protocols you can. For the most part, I probably won’t.
I have noticed on occasion that some websites consider other websites beneath them so you have to be careful about referring to a post on the “questionable website.”
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