This is a twist. Some of you may know the blog High On Sex (new URL) from the times over the years I’ve mentioned them here; it is a very opinionated sex blog that is loved by many, a blog somewhat along the lines of famed Synthetic Pubes. After over five years, it seems that Google has quietly and abruptly deleted the entire Blogger blog – and with no explanation, recourse or response to queries by the editor. I wonder if it was a glitch they’ve handled poorly, or something else. Pretty crazy when you consider all the splogs that are just churning away on Blogger. Why can’t this happen to all the Blogger blogs out there busily scraping all of us?
(…) On February 27th approximately 00.02% of users, according to Google, were affected by a bug that deleted all of their emails. (…) I figured I was among the .02%. Yet last Thursday the problem was supposedly resolved and I remain locked out of my account with all my content apparently deleted, about 5 years of blog posts included.
This could either mean Google accidentally and permanently deleted the content of a very select few and doesn’t want to admit it OR I happened to commit an obscure but ‘extreme’ terms of service violation during the Google outage OR some hacker infiltrated my account for nefarious purposes.
I’ve gone through the process of reclaiming my account and data but have yet to receive a response. I don’t know if I ever will.
We may never know the reasons behind the removal. (…read more, highonsex.tumblr.com)
Can you imagine having five years of blogging deleted overnight? No, I can’t either, and I don’t want to. EVER. High On Sex’s editor got nothing but silence from Google, and responded by starting fresh at Tumblr – who we all know has a more levelheaded approach to sexuality. In a follow up that turns into a very interesting post about warning pages and linking to NSFW content and filters, HoS’ Adrian Keys wrote in Link No Evil,
Although irritating, High On Sex’s abrupt departure from Blogger was long overdue. Ever since the site was slapped with a warning interstitial, I was thinking of moving on. But the effort required for such a move wasn’t something that inspired immediacy. It’s only now that I have been forced out that I find the energy to rebuild here at Tumblr. Still, I’m not sure when I’ll get around to fully restoring the posts that I have backed up… (…read the rest, highonsex.tumblr.com)
Image via High On Sex – is that a young Jenna Jameson with hands on ears?
UPDATE: High on Sex was not the only blog deleted by Google with no notice: it looks like long-running Fluffy Lychees has also been nuked. They also have been re-started on Tumblr.
Thanks for the post and support, Violet!
Bacchus, you’re right that having your own domain is the best way to go. Admittedly, it was naive of me to put too much trust into Google. The benefit of free blogging services, though, is that they help democratize the Internet and allow anyone without the tech know-how to start speaking to the world. If it wasn’t for Blogger I probably wouldn’t have gotten into blogging or certainly not have started as early as I did.
Of course when you begin to get serious you’re expected to pay for your own hosting and domain. But I was comfortable, and since I had not intentions of going commercial, I didn’t see much incentive to pay. I’m seeing more incentive now that I’ve been booted so abruptly. Yeah, Tumblr isn’t too dissimilar to Blogger, but at a moments notice it felt like the right place to go as I look at my options.
I’m glad he’s got backups, but oh, the pain of restoring it all. And for all the porn on Tumblr, I’m not sure I’d trust them as a new home — I sure see a lot of broken Tumblr links going to other tumblr blogs in status “deactivated”.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again I’m sure: Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing at your own domain that you control.
I wish there was original source information for that image. It’s brilliant.
Interesting, thanks for sharing! Couldn’t get to the site from your link, but got to it here: http://highonsex.tumblr.com/
I also had problems with the first link on my Droid. (Mobile browsing fail) But the google-fu is strong within me.
Well, the key lesson here is that you should never trust some one else to store your only copy of your content. Whether it’s your blog, the comments on your site, pictures, or anything else, make sure you can somehow store at least a copy on your own computer and also a backup somewhere else. You can figure that sooner or later something will happen, hacked account, lost laptop, DHS seizure, or something else. Redundancy is not an option, it’s a requirement.
The first link to High On Sex is missing the h in the http and it doesn’t link properly in some RSS readers.