Migration Woes: Mailanka's Musing is Suspended

 My apologies for being behind on my "the State of Psi-Wars" post, and pretty much everything else, as "vacation" has been rather intense this year.  But I tried to use the time to finally migrate the blog away from blogger.  After looking at a bunch of complex solutions, I decided to keep it simple and try Wordpress.com.  I would do a simple import of my blog posts on a free version, see how it felt, and then if I liked it,  upgrade.  I had it imported, it looked okay, and it just lacked some functionality.  Given that I'm pretty sure I'd be crucified for not having the index up properly,  I wanted to find a way to implement a sidebar similar to the one Mailanka's Musing already has. I couldn't get that to work, so I parked it and went to bed.

When I woke up, my new blog was suspended.  Why? For violating terms and services.  Which one? Well, I could message them if I felt this was in error.  I scrutinized the terms and services and found nothing that I could think of as a violation (this is hardly a porn or gambling blog), but why should I guess at why they banned me?  Shouldn't they tell me? If blogger didn't ban me, why did they? So I sent them not one, but two messages. Nothing back.

And to think they want $50 a year for the privilege of throwing me off their platform with no explanation.  This is why I didn't pay upfront.  I wasn't even on there for two days, and literally the only content there was the content you see here on this blog.

I cannot recommend Wordpress.com.  We'll see if they reply.  Perhaps it's "just a mistake" but I don't think I'll be using their services.

After stressing out about it to a friend, he suggested I park the migration.  Any existential threat posed by Blogger itself for an arbitrary ban like this (which, to be sure, is keeping me up at night now, because if Wordpress.com somehow found something objectionable, is there something Blogger would find objectionable?) is mitigated by the fact that I've backed up the blog several times, and most of the posts still exist as raw files on my computer (not all of them, but I could completely recreate, for example, the wiki if I had to).  He pointed out that with all the other stresses in my life at the moment, if blogging relaxes me, to just focus on that, and worry about the migration when I'm more relaxed and have more room to maneuver.

So I'll park it for now, unless Wordpress.com returns with a sufficiently humble apology, though I'm not holding my breath on that (my experience watching the tech world is that sites like these just let the algorithm rampage across their platform, and if hundreds of innocent users get caught in the crossfire, well, they have tens of thousands, so they don't care). Even if they get one, I expect I won't use a service this shoddy and this prone to failure and miscommunication. So I wouldn't expect to see a migration soon. My eventual solution will likely involve either self-hosting, or hosting on a remote server with a self-configured version of wordpress; the latter is less vulnerable to banning because the configuration will just exist and I can just find a different host if there's yet another rogue algorithm.

Still, I needed to vent my frustration. Happy New Year!