Suspended Blogs
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This morning (Tokyo time), I tried to log into my book review blog after a month-long absence only to be given the error message that my account is suspended. I sent a message to WordPress support; but, upon not hearing back from them, I began to comb the archives of the support forums for the topic “suspended accounts.” I noticed a number of posts from people with blogs that don’t seem to violate WordPress’s Terms of Service – no graphic images, no hate speech, no advertisements, no news aggregation, no robot writers, and so on. Each of these posters received a response along the lines of:
“If you contacted us through the ‘click here to contact us’ link in the notice on your Dashboard, our ToS department definitely received your request, and they’ll be getting back to you ASAP. As a policy, please refrain from discussing ToS issues on the public forums. Thank you for your patience!”
This response, repeated over and over – “As a policy, please refrain from discussing the Terms of Service in public” – seems rather frightening to me. Since the “Suspended Blogs” support page (http://en.support.wordpress.com/suspended-blogs/) says only that accounts are suspended due to violations of the Terms of Service, and since the Terms of Service themselves (http://en.wordpress.com/tos/) seem fairly cut-and-dry, not being able to discuss in public what constitutes a violation, or past histories of such violations, keeps users in the dark about why WordPress has suddenly shut down their seemingly innocuous blogs.
My questions are these:
(1) Is there a way to find out more about how and why accounts are suspended?
(2) Is there a place to learn more about non-obvious violations of the Terms of Service?
(3) What does WordPress gain from not allowing public discussions of the Terms of Service?
Frankly, the random suspension of my account is quite upsetting, and I’d like to understand why this is happening.
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My questions are these:
(1) Is there a way to find out more about how and why accounts are suspended?
Yes. There is a way to find out why your blog has been suspended. You click the link in the wrning message on touyr dashbaord and Staff will contact you. However why another blogger’s blog was suspended is a private issue between them and Staff.
refernce links:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/suspended-blogs/
http://wordpress.com/types-of-blogs/
http://en.support.wordpress.com/advertising/
http://en.wordpress.com/tos/
http://en.wordpress.com/abuse/
http://automattic.com/dmca/(2) Is there a place to learn more about non-obvious violations of the Terms of Service?
(3) What does WordPress gain from not allowing public discussions of the Terms of Service?
What the person with the suspended blog retains is privacy, as their Terms of Service viloations are not discussed in a peer support forum where Staff do not answer questions but we Volunteers do.Bottom line: I’m sorry but this is not a matter for posting to a public forum. We Volunteers answering support questions have no role to play in this process. This is between you and Staff. You have a warning notice on with a link in it — please click that link. That link works at all times (even when the regular contact form is closed).
If you have already contacted Staff by using the “click here to contact us” link in the notice, the ToS department definitely received your request. Please be patient as they’ll be getting back to you as soon as they can.
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