no control over our company blog anymore

• 

  agattila · Member · Mar 21, 2014 at 4:34 pm

  • Copy link
  • Add topic to favorites

  Hello,

  A few years ago our company started a free blog at wordpress.com

  One of our employees was the site admin and maintained the blog. He is not working with us anymore and before he quit he changed the admin password and we don’t have access to the blog anymore.

  We can’t log in and he won’t tell us the new password. How can we get back the access? Is there anyone at wordpress.com we could contact to get the control back over our (former) blog?

  Thanks for your help.

• 

  timethief · Member · Mar 21, 2014 at 4:54 pm

  • Copy link

  Hello there,
  Staff cannot simply hand over a blog to you. Every blog has a sole owner and it is the person with the username account who registered the blog under that username account and the associated address. You need to contact that person because they are the blog’s owner.

  After your contact the blog’s owner they can transfer the account to another username account. See here:
  adding users http://en.support.wordpress.com/adding-users/
  user roles http://en.support.wordpress.com/user-roles/
  http://en.support.wordpress.com/moving-a-blog/#transferring-your-blog-to-another-user-or-account

• 

  agattila · Member · Mar 21, 2014 at 5:07 pm

  • Copy link

  Yeah, unfortunately that’s the problem.

  We tried to contact the blog owner several times but he doesn’t want to transfer the account to us or create a new user for us.

  He is a former employee of our company (he used to do seo for us) and before he left the company he tried to do a lot of harm to the company. We were able to recover passwords of other sites but not of the wordpress blog.

  So you say we don’t have any chance to get back this blog without his cooperation?

• 

  timethief · Member · Mar 21, 2014 at 5:09 pm

  • Copy link

  Yes. He owns the blog he registered. No one else owns it.

• 

  auxclass · Member · Mar 21, 2014 at 5:31 pm

  • Copy link

  You have an HR / Employee relationship / Legal issue –

  I assume you had a contract with the employee that covered work product & your legal dept can remind him of the contract. Ask legal about getting an injunction to serve on WordPress.COM to prevent anyone from deleting anything until the disputed ownership is resolved.

  And yes as @TT has stated above, the former employee owns the blog (their email address actually)

• 

  agattila · Member · Mar 24, 2014 at 5:05 pm

  • Copy link

  Thanks, we are already consulting with a lawyer.

  Regarding to this thread: https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/how-to-transfer-an-inactive-website-to-new-owner?replies=24 it might be possible to suspend or make the blog private, but how? Is there anyone at wordpress or an admin or someone on this forum we could contact?