Well those no good fascists at wordpress.com went ahead and decided to enforce their terms of service and prevent me from hosting my “pornographic” content on their website. I figured it was coming, I prepared as best as I knew how to minimize the damage and now I’m back. Submissive in Seattle is now proudly self owned courtesy of hostgator and I can be as pornographic as I damn well please.
Hooray for Smut!
The damage wordpress has done to my work for the last two years is not catastrophic, but it is pretty extensive. On the bright side I was able to back up all my writing and all of my readers comments, and transfer them here. I can still go back and see my old posts and discussions.
On the other hand everything linking to my writing, and all the links from one post to another are dead. Overarching conversations and posts about growth that reference previous thoughts on a given topic no longer link to each other. In theory I could go through and repair each link on my site, one by one, but I doubt I will.
I’ve lost tons of images. All the pictures I uploaded to WordPress as opposed to those inserted via URL are gone. Many of the older pictures were saved only on my old dead laptop and won’t ever be recovered. Since most of these were personal photos, WordPress has ironically left me with only the pornographic images to which they objected.
Something, something, blackjack and hookers.
The biggest loss of course is my standing on the web. I’ve been working hard to be a positive voice for male submission, D/s relationships and BDSM in general. For several search terms and phrases I was a top hit on google. Now I’m back on the bottom of the pile, and my dead blog is still showing up.
So I’m going to be networking like crazy and pimping my new blog till it annoys everyone to tears. Mostly on Twitter, because as you may have heard Tumblr has decided to hide all it’s glorious porn from the viewing public.
Anyway, now that I’m up and running there is lots of work to be done. I’ll definitely appreciate any feedback on the new site or it’s format, as well as anyone sharing my new home with their readers.
– Peroxide
Yay!! Welcome back! You look great!
Ferns
Thank you Ferns! I couldn’t have done it (this quickly) without you.
Purely selfish: I wanted you back as soon as possible.
Ferns
Shame on WordPress! It’s so wrong – can’t grown ups write about respectful sexual relationships for other grown ups in this day and age?! Glad to see you back.
Yeah, it’s real obnoxious (although I think they objected more to my tendency to pepper my writing with gifs of hardcore pornography) I’m glad to be back up and running and I think the change to self hosting is going to be a good one.
I’ll have to update my blogroll and RSS.
Glad you were able to salvage most of your work. Even though I’m not porny, I’m now concerned that even my little efforts might be taken down. Ironically, I was just telling a few people last month that they should move to WordPress because they were less hassle than Blogger.
I’d be concerned if I were you, you may not be terribly porny, but you post enough TNA that they may object. It’s funny that we’re looking at this much censorship in this day and age.
Also, do you have an option for mobile browsers? It displays all funky on my Android, and I can’t enter text in the boxes.
I’ll look into it, it’s a little weird on my phone as well
OK, so I currently have a WordPress.com blog….but it’s hosted on my own domain…is it safe?
Also….how affordable is this option you went with? Where can I learn more about it? If you posted this info elsewhere, I apologize for being lazy – just point me in the right direction.
Glad you’re back!
And I will gladly pimp your blog on my tumblr because A. I have over 3,300 followers there, and B. they’ve flagged me (somehow) as NSFW not Adult which means more folks get through. I tag none of my posts, so I’m not sure how much the restrictions effect me anyway.
~ Geekdomme
You should be fine, you’re using wordpress software, but since you have your own domain they aren’t allowed to tell you what to do.
My start-up was about a hundred dollars, not too bad, I could have gotten a better deal on monthly costs by buying more than a year of hosting at a time.
Thanks for pimping me on tumblr, I’ve already seen my views jump back towards normal. Tumblr’s censorship is frustrating enough, but I’ve heard that they might be backing down on some of it’s restrictions.
Sorry, but Peroxide’s wrong (I think the terminology is confusing here).
Having your own domain name is irrelevant. If you are hosted by WordPress.com, you are bound by their TOS and you are at risk.
A hostgator Hatchling plan costs about $4 a month (they were touting 30% off on twitter, so check their account there). They will transfer your content from WP.com for you (if you aren’t suspended yet).
Ferns
Thanks Ferns! That’s precisely what I was afraid of and how I’d interpreted things as well. I will check out hostgator! Thanks for the info!
Are you sure the pictures are gone? Just because the laptop is dead, doesn’t mean the hard drive is. You can put it in another laptop and back it up that way. Plus, if you’ve never deleted your browser cache,they might be there. I don’t know how important those pictures are, but you can ask other people to check theirs too. And google around, I’m sure there’s a program that renames links.
They might be on that hard drive, if I get it fixed, but I don’t think the effort to recover them, and re upload them all would be worth it. I’m looking for a way to rename links en-masse.