TBK Health News Restored

I just received the following message regarding one of my blogs, TBK Health News, which had been suspended about three weeks ago when one of Blogger's spambots flagged it. As you can tell, the blog is not a spamblog or splog. I had sent two messages to Blogger beginning a couple of weeks ago asking them to restore it. I received a message a few days ago saying that it had been restored at that time. I didn't realize that I would have to repost it, but I did so a day or so ago, shortly before all of my blogs then utterly disappeared, having been deleted by Blogger, as evidenced by this message. I had begun another blog on money issues, but that was also deleted. I have not requested that it be restored, as it had very little to it. I believe that the fact that I could not actively work on these blogs caused the spambot to flag my entire account, even though I was highly active on my main blog, TBK News, still hijacked by the link-spammer at the moment. I have responded to Blogger's message, asking them to delete that link farm and restore my main blog ASAP.

The morals of this story appear to be:

1. Blogger's spambots are capricious and not particularly efficient.
2. Blogger is a free service; hence, it reserves the right to be inefficient and unresponsive. Fair enough. In all the years that I have had a free Yahoo mail account, I can't even recall contacting them with any problems, as I have long understood that such an attempt would be futile. It appears that Blogger, however, will respond at some point if the issue is pressed.
   
3. If you have a blog in your account that is not very active, you may get one or all of your blogs deleted. I have seen blogs that nobody's worked on in years, and they remain, but, as I say, Blogger's bots are capricious.
4. If your blog is deleted, using the Blogger Help Group is useful, but you may not wish to post the blog URL there, as it could be snapped up, as was mine. There is no way to know, however, whether or not the link-farmer got my URL from there or from some other process. No one hijacked my health blog URL, which I did not post at BHG, but that one isn't as popular. In any event, it may be a good idea take your URL back with a small post - I guess. I didn't repost anything because I thought that might interfere with my blog being restored in the first place. It never occurred to me that some slimeball would hijack my URL within a matter of hours. I have little experience with blogging, and I didn't even consider that someone could take over my URL.
   
5. You may wish to host your blog elsewhere, as you never know when Blogger's spambots will take you out.
6. It's probably a good idea to back up all your work, even though it's a pain and can certainly put a crimp in your creative style. In my case, time-consumption was a big factor, although I didn't even really consider that my entire blog could be deleted without a word to me beforehand. Again, the TBK Health blog was visibly suspended for weeks before it was deleted, despite my timely requests to restore it. With TBK News, nada, not a word, just - poof! Gone. In retrospect, it would be a better idea to figure out how to work a back up site such as Furl, rather than spend the time futzing around with cached pages or even with contacting Blogger help, as if I had furled the site, I could have reposted the entire thing fairly quickly. (I'm guessing, as I still haven't gone to Furl to figure it out. There's always so much to do...)
   

That's it for now. Let's hope that the rest of it is restored soon and that the link-farmer gets his comeuppance. Alas, having received probably hundreds of thousands of pieces of spam, including countless "spoofs" on Paypal and Ebay that are designed by evil people to get into your bank account, and knowing that it is impossible to investigate or prosecute even a tiny percentage of such, I doubt that anything will be done about this matter. As I know too well from a much more serious crime committed against me and mine that to this day remains unpursued, the authorities have their hands full and their priorities. (Which apparently do not include felonious child abduction, but that's another story...)

Thanks for your continued support.

From: "Blogger Help"
To: "acharya_s@yahoo.com
Subject: Non-spam review and verification request: http://tbkhealth.blogspot.com

Hello,

Your blog has been reviewed, verified, and cleared for regular use so that it will no longer appear as potential spam. If you sign out of Blogger and sign back in again, you should be able to post as normal.

Also, please note that you may need to republish your blog in order for it to be visible online again.

Thanks for your patience, and we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

Sincerely,
The Blogger Team