Blogger 'Fun'

When I got up this morning and checked my email, I found two notifications from Blogger in my email inbox. I always get quite excited when I receive a comment, because it's still quite a rare occurrence... But the subject line of the emails made my heart sink:

"Your post titled 'Robots in Disguise Rail Racer' has been deleted"

"Your post titled 'Cybertron Brakedown GTS' has been deleted"

According to each of these emails, it had been determined that these posts "violated our malware and viruses policy." and continued with the recommendation "We encourage you to review the full content of your blog posts to make sure that they are in line with our standards as additional violations could result in the termination of your blog."

Now, given that these emails came through around half past midnight this morning, while I was fast asleep, there wasn't much I could have done at the time... but I was shocked that summary action was taken to remove these posts without first giving me the option to review their content.

However, by the time I became aware of it, this issue had already been widely reported both within Blogger's support forums and on Twitter... Apparently "the Google Safe Browsing anti-malware service reported to browsers that a couple of the domains where Blogger-uploaded images are hosted, have been involved in a phishing attempt", which led to blogspot.com domains being blocked as "Deceptive" by some browsers.

It was reported that Blogger were "working on a fix", but with no real indication if any of the deleted posts would be restored...

...However, within half an hour of my originally posting this, I had new notifications that the posts had been reinstated...

...And yet, following the link in their emails initially lead to the same "Sorry, the page you were looking for in this blog does not exist." message...

...I eventually (about 2 hours later) found that the total number of posts recorded on my dashboard had returned to the expected number, yet the two posts had not returned. A little investigation revealed that they had been reinstated as drafts, so both have now been republished on their original dates (although the one from 2020 originally slipped into 2021 for no obvious reason).

Such drama.