I got an email from Blogger which caught me off guard. It said I'd broken their community guidelines in relation to a blogpost, specifically the one on Battersea from about a year ago.
"Your content has violated our malware and viruses policy", it said, which I found curious as I would never knowingly include malware in a blogpost, yet here it was, written out in the second paragraph. I also got treated to a yellow notice saying "This post was unpublished because it violates Blogger's community guidelines. To republish, please update the content to adhere to the guidelines", but there was no mention of the post itself on my homepage. I thought it could have been the "fear of the dark" post, but clearly it wasn't.
I included four links in the Battersea blogpost, and found the offending link.
Warning – visiting this website may harm your computer!
read the notice, regarding the link that referred to the Single Form sculpture. I've removed it and asked the decision to be reviewed, because I'd like to fill the newly created gap that's formed. Hopefully the decision will come through, and hopefully they'll side with me now that the post is up to their standards. Otherwise, the email says, "I will have the option to pursue [my] claims in court", which sounds like an overreaction to a blogpost being deleted.
This is the first time I've had my posts questioned, though I doubt it will be the last time. As the internet ages, more and more websites will become questionable and linking to them could end up harming my blog in the future. Obviously it's straightforward now if you remove or replace any offending links, you don't lose anything as a result, yet it could get more chaotic if you have a series of links and have to check all of them because one became faulty unknowingly. Wikipedia has many sources which are deadlinks, and they have an entire help page referring to link rot - arguably they should be more concerned about the issue than I should be, because far more people rely on Wikipedia for information (and what if they're accidentally redirected to a porn site or get a virus on their computer?)
I don't think anyone was affected by that link, though. That post hasn't been visited for a while now, indeed I suspect a bot flagged it. I appreciate that regardless, because even if browsers are getting better at blocking dodgy websites, there's always the risk someone slips through and ends up worse off. Yet if you know any dangerous links, please tell me so I don't have to appeal for the post to return.
Not that it mattered in the end - the post is now back up, and the process from suspension to reinstatement only took a few minutes. If you'd like to read it, the post is here.
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