UPDATE:

Red Square wrote:Guys - what happened to the Gates of Vienna? We at the People's Cube are worried sick. Could you briefly answer, just to bring some clarity for our readers?

If you need a new hosting service for it, perhaps I could help...

Dymphna of the Gates of Vienna wrote:We presume that Blogspot made us one of those "bumps in the road". We had mostly everything backed up - we always expected this- and will be up and running after a few days' heavy labor.

No communication from The Castle, of course. Just tried to access the blog as usual and got a 'this blog has been deleted' page.

Gee, just in time for the inauguration, too. Now we won't be able to not cover it again.

Dymphna

I apologize for replying to all of you with this mass email, but I
have no other way of responding in a timely manner.

Blogger “removed” our blog suddenly last night. One second it was
there; the next it was gone. If we had violated their terms of
service, we should have received an email, according to their own
established procedure. But we received no email.

I retain my “dashboard” account, as does Dymphna. And, as you can see,
I still have the gmail account.

There is no “deleted blogs” link on our dashboards, as there should be
if the blog had been deleted deliberately through a normal procedure.

For those of you who wrote about your own experiences connected with
giving Google your cell phone number: this can't be an issue, because
I gave Google our landline number several years ago, when they would
not let me into this gmail account without my giving them a phone
number.

Late last night I began the process that one always goes through with
Blogger: I posted a request on the help forum. That's really all that
can be done; you can't talk to human beings where Google is concerned.

Henrik Raeder Clausen is our technical guru. He also posted on the
help forum, and has actually received a response, which is unusual
with Google. Based on the replies, there seems to have been a major
problem with Blogger last night. Many other blogs disappeared in the
same fashion.

I anticipate that this is most likely a technical glitch on Google's
part, based on the number and types of blogs that had the same thing
happen to them last night. But we should know for certain within
another day or two.

It's also possible (but far less likely, in my estimation) that we
were taken down for political reasons. If it was a deliberate
take-down, we will migrate to another platform with our own domain
name. We back up the entire blog frequently, and the last backup was
on Monday. So only a few posts will be missing when we restore.

This is all that we know at present. I'll send out more emails if I
find out anything else. Dymphna will also send out Twitter messages.

Thank you all for your concern and support.

Ned

I apologize for replying to all of you again with this mass email, but
I have no other way of responding in a timely manner.

Our blog has now been returned to us!

Blogger “removed” our blog suddenly last night. One second it was
there; the next it was gone. If we had violated their terms of
service, we should have received an email, according to their own
established procedure. But we received no email.

Now it has reappeared just as mysterously as it disappeared. No
message, no explanation.

I think this was a technical glitch at Google, given how many other
blogs were affected, including lots of non-political ones.

We will continue with our “disaster preparedness” policy, with an eye
towards a migration to a secure platform that we have complete control
over.

Thank you all for your concern and support.

Ned

"This blog is in violation of Blogger's Terms of Service and is open to authors only
https://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/

If you are an author of this blog, tell us who you are! Sign in using your Google Account."

Gates of Vienna wrote:Sorry to hit everybody en masse, but Blogger has taken us down again. This one is different:
---------
Hello,

Google has received a Terms of Service complaint regarding malicious code on your blog. After conducting our review, and in accordance with Google's Terms of Service, we have removed the content at issue.

Terms of Service: https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/
Content Policy: https://www.blogger.com/content.g

The Google Team
---------

That's all I know at the moment. We are backed up, so we are OK for a new start somewhere else.

Ned

R.O.C.K. in the USSA wrote:I'm afraid I have to agree with Comrade Stalin's Ghost - definitely the work of the Intergalactic Zionist Conspiracy!

Dymphna wrote:We always hesitated to leave Blogger's firewall protection, though the
interface became more and more unworkable. Not having regular employment, we
go for what's free or cheap.

However, Blooger booted us out - for hate speech, I think. My guess always was
that they would shove us out after the election. And sure enough.

But first they played games, shutting the gates on our fingers without
warning. And then, after we'd set up shop w/ WordPress, Blooger suddenly
opened up the gates again. Which allowed Ned to put up a redirect.

Bloody bastids like to play mind games.

I remember the old Blogger before Google bought it. They had real live
customer service. I even knew some of the guys' names. And the interface was
simple and easy to use. Even the techno-challenged like me could do it.

Glad I don't have the burden of Google's karma. "Don't be evil" has to be the
tops for utterly vapid "mission statements". It's even ignorant of linguistics
and how the brain processes statements. Sucks to be them.

So yeah, that was a great move - all 12,000 posts and their attendant images
and comments were back up and running within a few days. Getting that pig -
12K postings - through the python caused a little initial indigestion but now
we're good to go.

Needless to say, we'd been waiting for that boot to hit the floor for quite a
while, particularly since the Breivik massacre in Norway in July 2011. That
was when several people began doing complete back-ups; lots of redundancy.

Dymphna
https://gatesofvienna.net/