A spammer forced wordpress to shutdown my blog
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For the past year I’ve had a blog at silkworm.wordpress.com. It was called “Defending Science, Scientists, and Non-Scientists.” It was an effort to promote public understanding and embrace of science through my documenting my personal accounts of personally dealing with anti-science movements in Kansas. Everything was going great until a few weeks ago a spammer hijacked my blog and erased my username and password and email from the blog. I contacted wordpress.com support and they were very helpful in regaining control of my blog for me. At this point, I didn’t know that the blog had been hijacked by a spammer, and I received a note from support saying, that I now see I may have misinterpreted, “I don’t know what has changed – but then these things do – sorry!” I’ve been needing to blog, but I’ve had a lot of work to do recently and when I tried to log in I was notified that the blog account had been suspended. I didn’t know what the violation was but some friends found my blog on the Google cache, and I noticed that my links section on the front page of the blog had spam links inserted into it.
All of my content was original, personal, and of local historical significance. I desperately would like to have it back. I read and agree with the Terms of Service. I also agree with wordpress.com’s handling of TOS infractions. I had absolutely no intention of violating the TOS, and I am certainly not a spammer.
I have learned many things from this experience. Always check your blog if you lose control of it no matter what, which I failed to do. Always save copies of content on your blogs on hard disk, which I have also failed to do.
In hindsight, I recognize how I could have avoided this unpleasant situation. I was just much more incredibly ignorant on these matters than I am now.
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Have you contacted WordPress about getting your contents back? They may have a copy somewhere. Support is closed until Monday, but try emailing then. It may not be a lost cause.
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I’ve emailed them 3 times over the past week with no response. They were pretty fast when I lost control of my blog. They may just have the policy of ignoring any inquiries regarding TOS violations. I think my next option is trying a different method of contact, though I don’t know where or who to contact yet.
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Well, if you still have your account you can send a Feedback on Monday explaining things again and mentioning that you’ve put a thread in the forum as well. Given that YOU did not perpetrate the TOS violation, even though it occurred on your blog, they could well cooperate.
If that doesn’t work, the powers that be do sometimes check the forum. I think you have a strong case in that you lost your WP blog because you were actually the victim of a crime, rather than because you violated TOS.
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I can’t log into that account now, so I worry that it is gone. I’d also like to obtain any information I can on the spammer so I can take legal action against it being that I am a victim of a crime that has caused some very real damages, even if I do manage to get the content back.
Thank you, raincoaster.
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What was your password?
You can say what it is here – I know what it is and I know what the spammer guessed it to be. -
Oh I just HATE spammers!
They fool you by making you downloading un-suspicious looking files which really ARE suspicious, hi-jacking your computer when you least expect it, fooling you with “good-looking emails” that really are bad, plugging Trojan horses in your network, making more than like 5,000 viruses per MINUTE! Really sad they shut down your blog. :( -
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mark,
I don’t know if you mean my password after control was regained or what it was for the year leading up to that. Some would think that it is an easy one to guess, but it was also an easy one for me to remember. The password served me well for a year with no problems. I didn’t realize that I lived in a world in which spammers sit at blog sites and guess passwords, but I guess if you waste so much of your time spreading information cancer that everyone is already so aware and tired of, then wasting your time trying to crack passwords to blogs that get less than 100 hits a day isn’t out of the question.
Either way, if you have the password, I’d appreciate it if you did not post it here.
Thank you.
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If mark says to send one in, it would be email right now as he is watching it for important ones!
Trent
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I don’t know how to send it then. I’ll be happy to comply with the request, I just don’t know how. Sorry, I’m still learning. Please point to it and I’ll figure it out. Clicking on “Support” just gives me a message that they’re closed.
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Just send an email to the following address (replacing the dot with . and at with @):
support at wordpress dot com
Give them your username, password and all the details that you can!
Trent
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Okay, thank you Trent. I guess that’s what katm was trying to tell me. The message has been sent via email to that address.
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Mark, I’ve cleared my cache, restarted, changed my email on my new blog, and it still won’t let me log into silkworm.wordpress.com. It’s telling me I have the wrong username. I’ve tried both silkworm and brockwichita several different times, making sure that the URL wasn’t pointed just at wordpress.com. When I try to give it the email that I still have for that blog it says it doesn’t have it.
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It is 2am in Britain, so I am not sure if Mark will be responding again, but I am sure he will be back to you in the morning! I might also talk back through the email unless he told you to post here as he is more likely to check that! (unless I am missing something).
Trent
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