Saturday, May 15, 2021

Blogger deleting posts in error

I woke up this morning to find five emails from Google Blogger telling me that posts had been deleted because they violated Google's terms on Viruses and Malware. What? A weather script for Conky? A post describing how I added memory to my laptop? Either somebody is injecting malicious code into Blogger posts, or this is an error, I thought. My best guess is it's a false positive detection of malicious content by Google. A quick Google found several people who had experienced the same issue on Blogger Help.

I got an email this morning that one of my blog posts was deleted for going against community guidelines.

I literally post about nail polish and using all my own images so there is no way it breaks any rules, so I’m confused and a little annoyed that it’s been totally deleted not just turned to draft so I can’t recover any of what I had written. Is there anything I can do about this or stop it happening again?!
 
And
 
I had written a blog yesterday about my son's battle with cancer and somehow received a phishing warning on my blog site. 

I'm not even entirely sure what happened or how this happened, but my Thursday, May 13th post was deleted by blogger saying I had violated their malware and viruses policy. 

I'm so confused by all of this and not sure if it was a link to a resource or what exactly was the cause of this - I link many medical terms regarding his diagnosis so people can learn more about them. But since this was completely deleted I don't have a way of recovering this blog (which is basically a journal of my son's cancer battle). 

Is there a way I can obtain this basic text from blogger or even from cached files on my local computer? I seem to be at my wit's end.
 
All seem to be getting the same stock answer:
 
Hi:  your posts may have been removed in error. 
Blogger is aware of the issue and working on a fix.
Looks like Google Blogger is going to owe a lot of people a serious apology. It seems no actual human being looked at the posts before they were deleted to see if they actually contained anything malicious. Deleting posts without human supervision, explanation or opportunity for appeal or review? Pretty bad look if it turns out to be an error.

UPDATE: I received emails to say that my posts have been reinstated (without explanation or apology), but the posts seem to have been reinstated as drafts. I hit the Publish button for all of them, so hopefully they are up again.

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