Posted on 03/18/2006 2:40:00 AM PST by saveliberty
The Great Blogger Degaussing Of 2006 Apparently the folks at Blogger have done a pretty horrible job of supporting their customers. Betsy Newmark had her entire site wiped out mysteriously by their system, and then experienced a boatload of frustration when she tried to correct the situation. Her URL also appeared to have been hijacked as well, but now seems like it's back on line.
She vented to Glenn Reynolds:
My blog disappeared from Blogger some time Tuesday. All I ge is a message that my blog wasn't found on their server. When I go to my Edit page, it doesn't show Betsy's Page as one of my blogs anymore. It's as if my identity was erased. I just get this very irritating message "The blog you were looking for was not found." It doesn't show up on my dashboard at all.
Now, somebody has started a blog using my address and hijacked it. This is not me, but it is my URL. How despicable is that?
http://betsyspage.blogspot.com/
I have been writing Blogger for the past two days and all I get are the irritating auto-generated messages. What does it take to get a personal contact from those guys?
They put up those deceptive notes on their Status Page saying that they are doing maintenance on the server and now everything is fixed. http://status.blogger.com/
IT IS NOT FIXED. They are either deceived or are deceiving people. Viking Pundit and DJ Drummond of Stolen Thunder and Polipundit have experienced the same thing, though DJ was somehow able to get his back.
Glenn's posting apparently did the trick -- someone at Blogger must have evicted the squatter and restored Betsy's blog. However, that kind of sloppy work and the horrid customer service rendered to Betsy should warn current and potential clients of Blogger to select another provider for their blogs. I've had great service from Hosting Matters, both in uptime and in customer support when things went wrong. I'm sure that there are many other blog hosts out there who could fill the need for Betsy and the many who were also affected by the outage.
Failures happen. It's what providers do to correct the situation that differentiates them, and of all industries, the blogging services should understand that most.
UPDATE: Betsy's back ... well, sort of. You can see her latest post here, but her domain still brings up a blank page otherwise.
Posted by Captain Ed at March 17, 2006 06:49 PM
She vented to Glenn Reynolds:--BETSY NEWMARK: "I seem to exist again."--I reached out to my friends in the blogosphere to tell them what happened to me. And they responded by putting up posts telling of my plight. I am so grateful to Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds, The Anchoress, Kim at Musing Minds, Lorie Byrd, The Sensible Mom, Joanne Jacobs, Don Singleton, Ed Driscoll, Enlighten NJ, and, of course, my husband, for publicizing my plight. Duane at The Forest for the Trees even set up a special Helping Betsy blog to recover my template. Wow. I'm sure I'm forgetting some of my other blogbuddies who put up posts to help me. And, check out the post at Political Humor telling the alternate history of the blogheist. I can laugh about it now. This is a good sign.
Double plus ungood, becoming a nonperson.
Winston Smith never had it so good.
Thanks for the links.
But her files have been erased and her page is blank.
The same thing happened to VikingPundit, but his page is back up.
What's worse is that someone hijacked her page after the incident.
The hijacking afterwards made it worse.
She had to tell Blogger to ask the squatter to get out.
http://betsyspage.blogspot.com/2006/03/i-seem-to-exist-again.html
I'll be hornswaggled- I see what you mean!
It's very upsetting. She had a great site, some great posts and links.
Then when Blogger had its problems, this user named "Sam" took her page and created a new format. I was hopping mad because even being on the outside, it looked like blognapping.
I hope that she will find a way to back up her content to avoid losing any in the future. Or at least to limit the loss.
This makes you wonder if someone is doing a trial run for something, like setting up phony McCain-Feingold violations for the next election cycle?
I know nothing about blogging. Do you pay blogspot for space? Is this a matter of getting what you pay for?
Now there is a term I haven't used in over 30 years.
In the Navy I used to do that to magnetic tapes before they got re-used. Brought back a memory or two.
Me, too. 25 years. CCTV and radar display deflection coils and video tape for the Air Force. :-) Degaussing is still used to bulk erase hard drives for security purposes. And get this: I used to work for a company that did a lot of DOD stuff. They would bulk erase a hard drive THEN put it through a heavy-duty metal shredder.
"What do you folks expect? It's free.
Try shelling out a few bucks and get a real host."\
Sue? Don't think so. Betcha buried somewhere deep in the user agreement are some magic words that get the host off the hook no matter what they do.
What would the blogger sue for, in the first place? That was my point. They are paying nothing for the space, so they can't sue for anything.
Web site hosting is so cheap these days that anyone who has something they think needs saying should just go ahead and pay to get their own URL.
I simply don't bother to visit any web site hosted on a free hosting service. I've never found one worth reading.
precisely, it's free
No I think the site is free and the backups may not be part of the deal.
Furthermore, if the backups aren't monitored, when they fail no one will know.
:-)
To me, taking down a blogsite is somewhat akin to repainting my wooden fence with all the neighborhood grafitti. If folks think their worthless pontifications are so dangburn worthy of preservation for posterity, there are such things as BUYING your own site and maybe a few floppies to save it on.
(Ssee how far behind the technology curve I just proved myself to be? That's why I don't expect FR to go out of its way to save anything I say for the ages.)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.