Saturday, June 24, 2006

An Ongoing Blogger Problem?

My blogs remain restored, but this sort of thing has been happening to others, as evidenced by the work of Chuck, the very helpful Blogger volunteer. Chuck had posted the following to the comments section of my blog. (Be sure to check the comments here as well for advice.)
Hi Acharya,

Thanks for starting this. Take a look at Gia's problem ("Another Blog Hijacked"), which appears to have started at the same time yours did:
A Blogger Security Problem?

If there really is a security issue, then we need to figure out what it is, and fix it. Your blog here may be a key element in that process.
I do not have Gia's technical know-how, and I think it's fantastic that she herself was able to fix the problem, and in such an amusing manner.

these two issues are somewhat different, in that in Gia's case it appears that someone actually hacked her account, whereas in mine, Blogger simply deleted my blogs, and my main URL was shortly thereafter hijacked because it was "available." Most of the bloggers who have problems like this one or like mine will not be able to resolve them in the manner that Gia did it, and I am thinking that they may not be able to resolve their problems as quickly as I did.

In my case, I already had a ticket into Blogger support from a couple of weeks ago regarding my health blog having been flagged as "spam," and that's the one that was used to fix the problem. To my knowledge, neither of the other two or so emails I sent to Blogger regarding this most recent problem were responded to - at least not yet. It is possible that sometime down the line, Blogger support will finally get to them and then respond. Hopefully, they will check to see if something was already done first before they "fix" what ain't broke. I am certain that Blogger support is completely overwhelmed and way behind. I have no idea what the structure of their company is or where their revenues come from or how many employees and volunteers they have, but they have so many problems, in addition to the most serious ones described here, that I'm sure they are getting bombarded with requests for help.

Again, I believe that the reason my problem - one of the bigger ones, as far as I can tell - was because I already had a ticket in from weeks ago. It may be useful for me to add that email exchange to this blog, so we can see exactly what kind of timeline we are talking about. I had actually responded twice to the flagging of my health blog, evidently setting up two tickets, the first of which had been responded to earlier. The second one, if I am correct, was the one that restored my deleted health blog and, subsequently, after I tagged the problem with my main blog onto it, my deleted main blog as well. I hope this makes sense. I will attempt further to reconstruct what exactly happened in my Blogger help exchange.

2 Comments:

Blogger Lori said...

My blog just diappeared tonight. Please help if you can.

8:17 PM  
Blogger Lori said...

How weird! I have tried to go to mine many times and all I got was a blank screen. Now it's back. It was down for probably 30 min. to an hour. I was starting to freak.

8:18 PM  

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