The Winner By Default Is WordPress

 I need to get something else out of my system, although I don’t think writing about it will. Time heals all wounds, but we’ll see.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you may or may not know that I was running a companion blog to this one called Sealingtheenvelop at Google’s Blogger. I knew I would eventually have to choose one because keeping up two blogs with two different formatting systems was more than I could handle. 

I was leaning towards going with Google’s Blogger, but an incident I wrote about in this review of King Kong (1976). Better yet, go to my blog, Sealing the Envelope, and read it there, but first, you’ll get a warning about it having sensitive content, so you’ll know what the fuss is all about. What is the “sensitive content”? Your guess is as good as mine. 

Somebody slapped the warning on it as soon as I published it. I don’t think the piece was reviewed, so the label must have been stuck due to some idiotic algorithm or something else Google pulled out of their butt. It may have been a glitch for all I know, but that doesn’t help matters.

As I understand, once you remove the supposedly offending content and update the post, the warning label disappears. Since there’s no way I could know what was so gawd awful, I removed the entire review except the marquee I use and wrote something in its place, then updated the post. The sensitive content warning remained.

I kept the post that way for about three days. Nothing changed. So I said screw it and returned the original review to its place. I continued to remain irritated by the whole thing. This incident was the second time Google had unnecessarily screwed me over. What’s that old saying about screw me once, shame on you, screw me twice, shame on me? There won’t be a third time.

Some years back, I had a paid domain that came up for renewal. For some unexplained reason, Google stuck my renewal fees behind some dashboard (I don’t remember what they called it), which I didn’t have access to. I tried contacting Google, but all I achieved was frustration. I only got a response after they sold the domain to some Asian Pornography Site, and they said, “Sorry, but there is nothing we can do about it now.” That’s how I ended up here with Clyde’s Alley. Of course, my domain reverted to blogspot.com. Still, it destroyed my traffic, especially searches using my old domain, which became links to nowhere.

The review/retrospective of Kong was one of the most extended articles I have written, with over 4000 words and 27 screencaps. It may have been lengthy, but I didn’t set out to make it that way. So whether this was a problem somehow, I don’t know. But trying to figure out the bad stuff that triggers a warning would be nearly impossible. And the too-big for their suits and ties or clown suits or whatever they wear at Google aren’t going to tell you. You have to figure it out.

In researching my problem, I came across someone else who had the same thing happen to him; only they stuck the label on his whole blog. He managed to get in touch (after much effort) with some snot at Google. He asked what the problem was. The response was, “You know what it is.” In other words, they were letting him know they didn’t give a shit. He ended up deleting his blog. I wonder if he went elsewhere or just gave up the project.

I doubt if Google cares whether or not I’ll be posting at Sealing the Envelope as big as they are. If they did, they’d offer a way to appeal this nonsense or tell you what they found offensive. The whole system stinks, but it’s their blog site, regardless of if you own the domain. You have to suck it up and accept it.

But I can’t. Just because the blog costs there are less demanding, I can’t deal with such bureaucratic nonsense continuously. So I’ll be doing the majority of my posting here. That’s not to say I won’t have problems at Clyde’s Alley in the future, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.