Hi people, it’s Tommy Robinson.
My case has been thrown out of court. The police attempted to fit me up, and it’s failed miserably. I apologise to anyone who has booked days off.
Your support through this has been much appreciated. God bless and no surrender.
No further details are available yet.
25 comments:
Whoop whoop hurray!
Thank G_D. And raise HIM.
Great news. The whole episode, the searches etc, sounded like a vendetta by the police.
Sorry for this off-topic question:
I am unable to access my own blog as an owner, and also people can't access it as readers. I tried Googling my blog and I get an error message saying it doesn't exist.
I've been writing, and viewing, my blog for years without a problem.
The error message I get when I try to access my dashboard as owner:
We're sorry, but we were unable to complete your request.
When reporting this error to Blogger Support or on the Blogger Help Group, please:
* Describe what you were doing when you got this error.
* Provide the following error code and additional information.
bX-przht1
PS: I tried Blogger Help forums, but they are maddeningly complex, and when I tried posting a question, it told me my post had "too many characters" and that it had to be under 8192 characters. My post was 883 characters (with spaces). When I re-tried with 100 characters, I got the same error message (even, at the end, one character -- as a test -- wouldn't pass -- obviously some glitch).
If anyone has any suggestions or help, I'd appreciate it. Thanks.
Great, Now "whaddabout" Singh.
DrShalit
Hesperado,
http://www.bloggingtips.com/2009/04/20/should-you-be-worried-that-blogger-will-delete-your-blog/
Go down the page a ways...
I read a couple articles there and they were compelling.
Thanks You New.
By the way, around the time of Obama's election, someone deleted a comment on my blog by one of Obama's Muslim supporters. If the author of that comment had deleted his own post, it would have said, "deleted by author". Only the blog owner can delete posts without a trace.
Since I did not delete that comment, I conclude that Google Blogspot went into my blog without my permission and deleted it.
I don't particularly see this as a victory for common sense more too the fact that the powers that be couldn't push it through. Wait a few years
I consider it a victory for common sense - though just a battle won, not a war. Many more episodes will come up, and I'm sure the Forces of Evil will learn, adapt and become sneakier.
For the moment, Tommy deserves a drink and a good time :)
Hesperado - where is your blog indeed? This kind of thing scares me. Makes me consider that controversial blogs (including all the Anti-Jihad) must be content mirrored on different blog systems ideally in different countries. A software tool could automate that multiple mirroring in real time. Maybe such a backup and redundancy facility could be provided as an institutional infrastructure to any and all AJ (among other) blogs. That's a needed institution. Being prepared - one less vulnerability.
Hopefully it's an innocent tech glitch, soon to be fixed, and nothing nefarious.
Westward Ho,
I don't know. I can no longer access it as owner, and visitors who try to go there via a link or Googling get a "blog has been removed" message without further explanation.
I provisionally set up a new blog, aptly called Lemonade, whose first posting has a couple of extra details.
Hesp-
God help us, I hope you have a backup on a disk somewhere. And failing that, a lawyer. The AJ community must have some lawyers who could figure what actions might help undo this.
Hesperado--
Some years ago we were suddenly denied access to GoV. No explanation and it appeared to our readers that we'd simply walked away.
Fortunately, our banner picture at the top of the home page is NOT hosted on Blogger, but on our ISP, a dial-up service we've kept for images and for our webmail.
Ned was able to post a message to our readers there and ask them to contact Blogger.
This is a mean situation and you don't have real control...the price of having this "free service" that is impossible to hack. OTOH, Blooger can hack it anytime it wants.
IIRC, it took about 5 days or so to get back our ownership. If they were to do it now...they're a whole lot bigger and less responsive.
I hope you find an answer. Should you EVER get it back, find a way to preserve your banner's integrity so that you can let people know in the future. Not much help now...
...do you have any idea if a complaint was made? Someone pulled that schoolyard-bullies trick on us with Yahoo. For many months, we could get messages from our readers who used Yahoo (and all its variants) but we couldn't SEND any responses. We had to get on gmail to do that.
Months later, the ban was lifted. We never knew (or cared, really, after the first shock) why we were blocked, and we never found out why we were suddenly unblocked.
Your Blogger blog may have been wrongly deleted as a "splog" (spam blog) or as a violation of Blogger's TOS.
Please click this link and try following these instructions:
Blogger Tips and Tricks
Also, please click HERE and email me directly.
I will get back to you later when I have some time to follow up on this.
Thanks Dymphna and 1389 and Westward Ho.
Dymphna,
I hadn't realized GOV had gone through something like this in the past. It sounds like your situation was probably not related to content, as your service came back after a few days. I never had any special kind of banner or logo, just a title, so I don't care about that. Nor have I had any complex set up of sidebars and widgets etc. It was mainly just sheer text. At some point about one year ago or longer ago, I simply copied all my essays and plunked them into a Word file. But I neglected to do that in the last year, plus during this past year I went back and made many little alterations of my older posts. All that is gone, apparently, unless the blog reappears.
If my blog was yanked for content, as I show on my new blog Lemonade, Blogger has one stipulation in their "Terms of Service" which sounds not unlike European (or Canadian) laws about "hate speech". And the fact that I have been writing for 6-odd years and spewing out "hate" that long doesn't mean they hadn't been neglecting me all this time only to belatedly find out recently, to their horror, just how "racist" The Hesperado is.
As for how they found out: There's a reader over at Jihad Watch with whom I have had many tussles over the years -- he has been irrationally angry at me, has showered me with personal insults, has made comments imbued with hints of physical violence against me, and even in a fit of anger once wrote what I and a couple of other Jihad Watch readers consider to be a veiled death threat against me. This particular chatter seems to have a neurotic, almost pathological, obsession with loyalty to Robert Spencer, and has for years considered me to be an enemy of Spencer. Recently, the issue of our enmity was sparked anew, in a very long off-topic discussion on one Jihad Watch comments thread where others (including a couple of JW regulars who were my only defenders) hashed over the whole thing again (I was unable to participate, as Spencer had banned me from comments only a couple of months before), and that particular chatter weighed in, though demonstrating a bit more "anger management" than usual.
At any rate, it wouldn't surprise me if he had contacted Blogger with a complaint about my blog, just to get back at me and at least make good on a virtual "death" of Hesperado.
Thanks Dymphna and 1389 and Westward Ho.
Dymphna,
I hadn't realized GOV had gone through something like this in the past. It sounds like your situation was probably not related to content, as your service came back after a few days. I never had any special kind of banner or logo, just a title, so I don't care about that. Nor have I had any complex set up of sidebars and widgets etc. It was mainly just sheer text. At some point about one year ago or longer ago, I simply copied all my essays and plunked them into a Word file. But I neglected to do that in the last year, plus during this past year I went back and made many little alterations of my older posts. All that is gone, apparently, unless the blog reappears.
If my blog was yanked for content, as I show on my new blog Lemonade, Blogger has one stipulation in their "Terms of Service" which sounds not unlike European (or Canadian) laws about "hate speech". And the fact that I have been writing for 6-odd years and spewing out "hate" that long doesn't mean they hadn't been neglecting me all this time only to belatedly find out recently, to their horror, just how "racist" The Hesperado is.
[contined next]
[continued]
As for how they found out: There's a reader over at Jihad Watch with whom I have had many tussles over the years -- he has been irrationally angry at me, has showered me with personal insults, has made comments imbued with hints of physical violence against me, and even in a fit of anger once wrote what I and a couple of other Jihad Watch readers consider to be a veiled death threat against me. This particular chatter seems to have a neurotic, almost pathological, obsession with loyalty to Robert Spencer, and has for years considered me to be an enemy of Spencer. Recently, the issue of our enmity was sparked anew, in a very long off-topic discussion on one Jihad Watch comments thread where others (including a couple of JW regulars who were my only defenders) hashed over the whole thing again (I was unable to participate, as Spencer had banned me from comments only a couple of months before), and that particular chatter weighed in, though demonstrating a bit more "anger management" than usual.
At any rate, it wouldn't surprise me if he had contacted Blogger with a complaint about my blog, just to get back at me and at least make good on a virtual "death" of Hesperado.
Hesperado --
Dymphna meant that our banner header image -- which was hosted elsewhere and not at Blogger -- was used to send a message to our readers.
Our blog was not removed; we were simply denied access to it. It had been provisionally flagged as a "spam" blog. Blogger gave us a notice to that effect when we attempted to log in to it.
So I changed the normal header for GoV to a text image, but using the same file name. The text read something like "HELP! Gates of Vienna has been marked as a spam blog! Please write to Blogger and tell them it is not spam, and to release control back to us!"
I was told that the appeal process normally took 2-3 weeks. However, hundreds of people evidently did write to Blogger, because the blog was released to us in 3 or 4 days, and we have had no trouble since then.
This has happened to others, and it is apparently random, and not based on content. Judging by the crappy algorithms Blogger uses to mark comments as "spam", that's a believable explanation.
But your case seems to be different. If your blog just disappeared, that's something else entirely.
Baron (and 1389),
When readers try to access my blog, or when I just click on a result from a Google search for "hesperado" leading to my blog, we all get the same message that "this blog has been removed" -- which I gather did not happen to you and Dymphna.
Even so, I suppose it's possible that it's also due to their spam-prevention mechanism, which might generate different modes of denial.
In the last 24 hours, I am getting a new page from Blogger when I try to log on to my Hesperado (I keep trying every few hours), which asks me for a phone number so they can text me a code for me to input in a box on that request page.
I just got an email from a friend advising me "not to give out my phone number". Would this be a security problem with Google/Blogger?
Thanks 1389, I am working through the tips page and will contact you shortly.
Hesp, if you google search for 'hesperado' and then click on the cached version, it is possible, from the cached version, to access the comments, which will display the original post (when the link is clicked on) with comments. In fact, it's possible to post a comment.
While it's possible to access via the Google cache, you might want to grab and save your essays.
Hesp: using the above method, I was able to save the text of "Proto PC" to "Attack of Austeritis".
With a bit of canny searching in Google's cache, it should be possible to save more.
Any chance of enabling comments on 'Lemonade' so I can leave Baron & Dymphna in peace? :-)
Thanks Luddite -- I've already begun doing that before you mentioned it. In fact, I believe I can find all my essays, by Googling "hesperado" and then in Advanced Search option, specifying the hesperado URL.
Then I will copy the text of all of them and paste them into a massive Word file. After that, I will put them into a new "Hesperado Archive" blog (I may rename it, just to stay on the safe side).
But it will be laborious and tedious to do this.
@Hesperado,
Formerly, Google Blogger could be contacted via support@blogger.com but I don't know whether this works any more.
I noticed that comments are turned off at Lemonade. Is there any particular reason for this?
If you want to mirror your blog posts at 1389 Blog, I can set you up with an account. We have our own server space and domain name and everything is backed up. You already have my email; just let me know.
Thanks 1389,
I haven't taken the time to get my Lemonade blog spiffed up yet. I will get comments enabled soon. As for contacting Blogger, I'm leery of embarking upon a process that will likely be tedious, time-consuming, frustrating, annoying, and probably ultimately fruitless.
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