The Great Blogger FUBAR
August 1st, 2008 by Syd
A number of gun bloggers have suddenly found their blogs locked to new posts and then they receive a form letter from Blogger saying that they are suspected of being a “spam site.” (This is kind of funny to me since there are thousands of real spam blogs on Blogger that they never seem to do anything about.) Anyway, this has resulted in a mass exodus of gun blogs off of Blogger to other hosting options.
I have been working through my blogroll for the past hour or so just updating the blogroll with the new URL’s. Some of these include
The War On Guns, new url: http://waronguns.wordpress.com/
The Real Gun Guys, new url: http://therealgunguys.com/blog/
Armed and Safe, new url: http://armedandfree.wordpress.com/
A Keyboard and a .45 has also been locked out, but has not decided to move yet.
Traction Control has offered free parking for blogs that want to move off of Blogger.
Say Uncle pointed out here that a number of lefty blogs have also been locked by Blogger, so it seems to be an equal opportunity screw-up rather than a focused effort to silence gun blogs. I went through a similar round of Blogger stupidity about a year and a half ago, and moved my blog to one of my own web sites. I know I have been a lot happier since I started hosting my own blog. Now I control my content and I’m not dependent on the unresponsive Blogger tech support.
Friends don’t let friends do Blogger.
If I have missed anyone who has moved, please leave a comment and I’ll update the list.
Blogger locked my site concerning Vigilante Justice too, we were an anti-pedophile site, go figure…
Some of you guys do what we did, get the domain names bought thru GoDaddy and then do a site thru Traction Control, and split the costs…
We’re figuring that when all is said and done our little blog consortium will cost each site owner less than @20 for 2 years…
Although it is tempting to think so, I tend to discount conspiracy theories on the part of the Internet giants when it comes to this stuff. The one instance I can think of which seems to have some merit is on Wikipedia, where Jimmy Wales, the founder, has used his weight to crush political opinion he disagrees with.
But for the most part, I think that the problem with Google/Blogger is that it is a perfect example of a “one size fits all” offering. For bloggers who cannot afford hosting their own domain, or who are not technologically competent enough to do so, there are other alternatives besides Blogger - such as Word Press, or Movable Type. But, because Blogger has such tremendous name recognition, I think that newbie bloggers are attracted to it.
In any such online community - craigslist would be another example - there exist groups of hard core of netroots who live for flagging sites and/or posts with which they disagree. They have one thing in common, and that is a complete disregard for free speech rights, unless it concerns their own. They cynically take advantage of how the system works to flag a site, knowing that this will shut the site down for extended periods, while the site owner has to navigate the corporate maze to defend themselves. It is nothing short of cyber vandalism by moral cripples who are otherwise to bug-witted or lazy to properly hack a site and take it down
My personal opinion is that this mental illness is almost exclusively the domain of the hard left. I do not mean “liberals” as in “left of center;” I mean those hard leftists who increasingly endorse or actually embrace various forms of terrorism (eco-terrorists, for example) and other extremist ideologies which are anathema to most of our traditions - including our 1st and 2nd Amendment rights.
In any case, I doubt that the server owners like Google et. al. are actually complicit in this beyond having created such a byzantine system as to make it next to impossible for the accused site owner to rectify the situation if they’ve been flagged. It’s a perfect example of why “zero tolerance” solutions are such a bad idea. They leave no room for wisdom or good judgement.