Homeless in Vancouver: The "S" word and I don’t mean "suspension"

On Sunday, I wrote a post about a new feature WordPress.com had quietly added to the stats page. It was more than that actually; it was a recap of the events of the last two months, which led to the new feature.

When I was satisfied I had punished the English language enough, I hit the publish button. An alert told me I didn’t have permission to publish. I tried to save the post; didn’t have permission for that either. Frustrated, I logged out.

When I logged back in, my dashboard was the visual equivalent of a screaming klaxon: Wah-ooo, wah-ooo! Red-boxed text declared that my WordPress blog had been suspended for violating the terms of service!

Kicked out of the Garden of Blogging for 18 hours!

Suspended. Really? My grammar wasn’t that bad—was it?

Oh, but I’m not that thick—it had to be the post I wasn’t allowed to publish. It was painfully clear.

I had used the “S” word—the name of the Russian spammers, which almost rhymes with tumult but doesn’t.

The post that appears to have triggered my suspension was a recap of a two-month rain of spam disguised as referrer links. I wrote the post after noticing WordPress had quietly added the ability to flag a referrer link as spam.

I had very likely run afoul of a new regime of spam filtering brought about by the shenanigans of the Russian website that figured so prominently in that post.

Another WordPress blog has just come back online after a week of being suspended by WordPress for violating terms and conditions. Turns out their sin was that they had also used the “S” word.

It appears to be a case of setting you car alarm to be way too sensitive and it sort of puts the lie to the way WordPress tried to publicly brush off the seriousness of what the Russians were doing. Obviously behind the scenes WordPress took it very seriously.

I didn’t miss WordPress. Like hell I didn’t!

While I waited on WordPress.com to respond to my inquiry regarding my suspension, I was able to grab an XML file of my blog content. I ran it through an online WordPress to Blogger converter and poured the resulting slop into a Blogger account. I do not like Blogger much.

Fortunately my suspension has been short-lived—less than 24 hours. Within the last hour, a WordPress “Community Guardian” has emailed me to say I am now unsuspended:

“Your site was flagged by our automated anti-spam controls. We have reviewed your site and have removed the suspension notice.

We greatly apologize for this error and any inconvenience it may have caused.”

I really do appreciate their prompt attention in admitting and correcting the error. I appreciate that WordPress.com is serious about trying to keep their garden pest-free. But I also feel a little like someone who’s been tasered by an over-zealous mall cop.

WordPress is still my favourite content management blogging system. As I said, I don’t much like Google’s Blogger but I also don’t like the prospect of losing nearly a year’s-effort because of what I consider to be an overreaction.

Obviously the answer is to self-host my WordPress blog. Now I have some incentive to work a little harder on sorting that out.