What do you do if your blog is suspended?
Posted by pumpupyourbook on October 29, 2009
This is the dilemma my good friend, Cheryl Malandros, experienced this morning and I thought I could give you some helpful hints if it happened to you.
A lot of authors are blogging on the free blog platforms – mainly Blogger and WordPress. The problem with this is that anyone at any time can declare your blog offensive just for the heck of it. Didn’t know that? Sure enough! It happens all the time. The only real inconvenience of this is that you have to wait a few days for it to come back, that is if the mighty gods of WordPress and Blogger deem you innocent.
Cheryl was innocent this morning when she clicked over to her blog to find out WordPress had suspended her blog. Sometimes we don’t know why they deem us offensive, but Cheryl did. It seems someone who had registered the same blog name with a .com had found Cheryl and was mighty upset she was using “her name” and was taking business from her. Cheryl doesn’t run a business at her children’s book blog, The Kid’s Book Connection, but obviously, someone else is.
The woman became irate even though Cheryl tried to explain to her the difference in urls – the woman had a .com and she had a wordpress.com and we’re all presuming this is the reason why Cheryl’s blog was suspended this morning. Of course, WordPress will see it’s not offensive and turn her back on, but what do you do when this happens?
One, you wait, but while you’re waiting, there’s a few things you can do to access your blog that is no longer accessed by its url.
If your blog is old enough, you can find the archives at a nifty site called The Wayback Machine. Unfortunately, the blog was too new for this so another trick I use is to put your url in google and when the url shows up, click on “cache.”
When I clicked on “cache,” I found her blog and what was on the first page. If I wanted to find more, I could probably put “The Kid’s Book Connection” and “the author’s name” in search and the url might come up. I would then click on “cache” and voila there it is.
But the thing that gets me most about all this is that all of this should have been unnecessary. Cheryl’s blog is not offensive; it just is the same name as this other person’s blog who is trying to make money to support her kids as she told Cheryl. Cheryl was sympathetic, but how was she to know this when she picked out the name? All she did was put it in the box at WordPress and WordPress tells you it’s available. Simple. She never would have thought someone would be out to get her like that.
The unfortunate thing is that if you are paying for a domain name and hosting it yourself, you’re going to not be able to stop the free blogging platforms out there who will be registering the same name simply because the url is different. The only thing you can do is go into as many free blogging platforms and register the name so that no one else can use it. I think this is a bit going over the top, but if you’re the kind of person who wants the name all to yourself, that’s the only way you can do it.
I’m sure Cheryl will recover her blog, but if it happens to you, try these easy methods to at least get a few of your archives back. All I have to say is, thank God for Google.
ccmal said
Well, you were too optimistic because the Mighty WordPress gods state that I must remove the content of my blog and choose a new name. Since this woman’s blog existed in 2008, and since WordPress is obviously not smart enough to set up its software to tell you that the domain name is in use–like Blogger does–I now have to export my data.
Coincidentally, WordPress must think readers of blogs are so ignorant that they can’t tell the difference between a book review blog and one that sells Usborne books, because that was another one of their reasons for telling me I had to change the domain name–you readers might be confused.
Let this be a reminder to all bloggers, check Google before selecting a domain name for your blog.
Cheryl
pumpupyourbook said
That just doesn’t make a bit of sense unless she had a blog through wordpress before she bought the domain name and used that name and if that was the case, when you filled out your name in their box, they would have told you it was unavailable. I’d have to have more than this to convince me that you were in the wrong.
ccmal said
Well, I sent off an additional email to them tonight–not that responded to the last one. I mentioned how I could go right now and purchase a bunch of domain names with “thekidsbookconnection” in them and there’s nothing this woman could do about it legally. And actually, I’m considering it, because this is so bogus.
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