Blogger has deleted Doug’s account, possibly because someone flagged his blog as spam. We don’t know for certain because they won’t respond to his emails. Doug has never sent an unsolicited email or made bizarre comments on strangers blogs in an attempt to get people to his blog. Without Reality Me as an outlet, Doug will either lose what sense he has left or (more likely) drive me off the deep end.
He can’t log-in and you’ll notice that he no longer has a profile. Blogger can delete any account for any reason.
They what? Good grief. I hope he gets it straightened out. I don’t think they can do that without notifying you first, can they?? (All they had to do was read the darn thing to see it wasn’t spam!)
Blogger was down a bit yesterday. I wonder if that was part of the problem.
You mean he can’t access it to make posts? Cause I can get to it just fine…
That’s just crazy.. has to be some mistake… I love doug’s blog.. there’s nothing inappropriate in it at all!
I sent a note to blogger asking them to figure out what happened to his blog. I’ll let you know if/when they respond.
I booted Typepad and jumped to knoxblogs.net’s hosting, and its been great. Configuring wordpress can be a bit of a bear, but I’m sure he’d have no problem with it. I’d strongly suggest it, because Blogger is teh suck…
I miss his blog, I”m sending them a note as well.
I think several of us bloggers should all post about it and start a blogger sit in or post in or something.
It looks like that link works – is that the one that was deleted? Or did they restore it? I’ve had 5 removed for no reason, and guess what, am blogging about it …
They haven’t deleted the blogs, just his account.
Here’s the body of an email I shared recently explaining what happened.
—
They deleted the ‘djuggler’ account. I immediately re-registered it. The only reason http://cursed-juggler.blogspot.com/ still shows is that I had a session open and republished the whole thing before closing that browser. I lost _all_ my drafts and I had plenty.
I brought it on myself. And although I think their business practices are flawed I cannot be too irritated over it.
Blogger encourages Adsense since it helps drive Google’s revenue. They even include an option to include Adsense in RSS feeds for “approved publishers”.
When I started publishing the lottery results on http://www.tnlotteryresults.com/ I was curious to know if the search results would be different using one of Google’s own services so I created http://tnlotteryresults.blogspot.com/. Using Bloggers ftp interface I also published to http://www.tnlotteryresults.com/blog/ I did this for almost a year and a half.
I was surprised to find that Google, MSN and Yahoo each picked a different lottery site to index. http://www.tnlotteryresults.com/ and http://tnlotteryresults.blogspot.com/ received almost the same amount of hits and brought in an equal amount of revenue while http://www.tnlotteryresults.com/blog/ was responsible for about half. I was making money on adsense. I was certain I could grow it.
I decided to grow it out and built out http://www.completelottery.info/ then created 1 blog per state following the format of http://–lotteryresults.blogspot.com/ and started adding data one state at a time. I was up to about 7 states and that is all I could manage by hand. Blogger has an API for developers to create things like Hello, spammers to create spam blogs and so forth. I had planned on automating the process but never got around to it.
My lottery blogs started show captcha on posts with a (?) for more information. The more information explained their “automated system detected spam like characteristics on my blog. Sometimes this is in error. Click here to request a human review of your blogs.” So I followed the procedure to request a human review. After all I was working hard and every day putting up new data. On some states I was even posting news articles for and against the lotteries.
Well, I guess the reviewer and I didn’t see eye to eye. But instead of sending me an email asking me to remove the offending blogs they just deleted the account with offending and non-offending blogs and I didn’t receive ANY communication until a week later after I’d sent several dozen emails using various email addresses. When I did they were very terse. They have no appeals process. They have no phone number to call. No address to send a letter. I view it as a poor business practice. A spammer wouldn’t care. They would immediately create a new account and keep going.
I suggested to them that they could have 1) for each of my blog addresses temporarily published a page that read “this author has broken the TOS. The author’s blog has been temporarily removed until it can be brought into compliance.” and/or 2) the next time I logged in instead of seeing the dashboard I should have seen a TOS, a prompt for I AGREE, and a note that unless blogs _______, ________, and _____ are brought into compliance my account may be removed. Either of those would have prompted action and kept me an advocate of Blogger’s services. They could have deleted just the offending blogs and I would have been bothered but understanding.
I had a paper journal stolen that recorded 3-5 years of my life. It probably went into a trashcan unread. To this day I agonize over not being able to read that journal. I have the same feeling of robbery now over the 2 years of various drafts that I slipped into the blogger system.
I’ll probably start up again shortly under a domain and server that I control.