A Phish Out Of Water

My T3 blog at transitiontenterden.blogspot.com has been locked/deleted by Blogger. I logged in to Blogger to create a ost about the upcoming Tenterden Clean Up Day in April, which is a joint effort between T3 and the Tenterden Town Council.

When I got to my blogs page , I was greeted with this:

Click to enlarge.

"Violating Terms Of Service?" My little community action group's blog? Pourquoi?

So I clicked the Appeal button and almost immediately my gmail inbox received this:

Reviewed and confirmed? In ten seconds flat? I don't think so. And Phishing?

phishing

ˈfɪʃɪŋ/

noun

1. the fraudulent practice of sending emails purporting to be from reputable companies in order to induce individuals to reveal personal information, such as passwords and credit card numbers, online.

I don't think so. 

So I immediately started a frantic search for a helpline, a phone number, an email address, anything so that I could communicate with Blogger and tell them they'd made a mistake. But try as I might, my search proved fruitless.

In investigating the Blogger forums it appears there have been a slew of these kinds of deletions on perfectly innocuous blogs recently, enough to make me believe that people are systematically getting their accounts hacked, the phishing thingumabobs placed into the comments sections of the pages and then Google's phishing-detecto-bot picking it up and deleting the entire blog without a word of warning to the blog owner. 

Thanks for nothing, Google. Four and a half years worth of blog posts just gone. Just like that.