Blogger Deleted My Blog!

Yesterday morning, I awoke to a very disturbing e-mail from Blogger:

Hello, Your blog at http://emilyhomesteader.blogspot.com/ has been reviewed and confirmed as in violation of our Terms of Service for: PHISHING. In accordance to these terms, we've removed the blog and the URL is no longer accessible. For more information, please review the following resources: Terms of Service: https://www.blogger.com/go/terms Blogger Content Policy:https://blogger.com/go/contentpolicy -The Blogger Team

The thing is, just before that Google had made me reset my gmail password, giving me the reason that there had been suspicious activity on my account. Apparently, when someone hits one of your Google products, a red flag goes up everywhere (although I didn’t hear anything from YouTube. Go figure).

Anyway, of course after reading that e-mail I freaked. Phishing? I don’t know how to phish, and besides, I’ve always hated having to mutilate a worm with a hook.

I read the Terms of Service for Blogger, and couldn’t figure out what I might have done wrong. Then I got mad at Google for number one, not telling me what was wrong and number two, giving me a chance to fix it. They simply deleted my blog.

The only thing I could come up with was that they were now forbidding Blogger users from asking people to opt-in to an e-mail list. In order to download the Take Back Your Life e-book, you need to sign up for my list. But if that were so, they weren’t saying so in the TOS.

I did several online searches, and came up empty. Except that I found that Blogger's automated checker sometimes finds malware and spamming where there is none.

All I could do was go back to my Blogger dashboard, click the “appeal” button next to the name of this blog, and hope for the best. I thought I was going to have the opportunity to write out something, but all I got was a message that someone was going to review my blog and I would hear back from Blogger in the next few days.

Gr-ay-ay-t.

I huffed about it for a while, and in the end just decided that if I lost all the blog posts, oh, well. Maybe God wanted me to ditch it.

After lunch, I got online again. And found this e-mail in my inbox:

Hello, We have received your appeal regarding your blog http://emilyhomesteader.blogspot.com/. Upon further review we have determined that your blog was mistakenly marked as a TOS violator by our automated system and, as such, we have reinstated your blog. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused in the meantime and thank you for your patience as we completed our review process. Thank you for understanding. Sincerely, The Blogger Team

Thank God.

So, here we are again, back in the saddle.

But really, Google, don’t you suppose you ought to fix those bugs in your automated system?