Pornocalypse Comes, Blogger/BlogSpot Edition
My twitter feed just lit up with outrage about the email Google just sent to some or all of the adult bloggers on Blogger/BlogSpot blogs (of which there are a lot):
Important Update to Adult Content Policy on Blogger
You are receiving this message because you are the admin of a blog hosted on Blogger which is identified to have Adult content.
Please be advised that on June 30th 2013, we will be updating our Content Policy to strictly prohibit the monetization of Adult content on Blogger. After June 30th 2013, we will be enforcing this policy and will remove blogs which are adult in nature and are displaying advertisements to adult websites.
If your adult blog currently has advertisements which are adult in nature, you should remove them as soon as possible as to avoid any potential Terms of Service violation and/or content removals.
Sincerely,
The Blogger Team
Great thanks to Molly for sending me a copy; I myself do not have any Blogger-hosted sites because of Bacchus’s First Rule. However, Blogger/BlogSpot have a long history as the most reliable and long-lived host for free blogging, and (other than a heavy hand with an adult warning page that went up a few years ago) they’ve always been entirely adult-friendly. I didn’t see this coming, not in any specific way.
Obviously currently active bloggers can (if they move quickly — four day’s warning, seriously Google?) delete offending affiliate links and save their blogs. But the real impact here will be in to the long list of moribund adult blogs going back for most of a decade. There are many thousands of these, and being moribund, there’s no hope that they’ll be saved. Not only will they vanish from the web (I wonder if Google will use robots.txt to kill them in the WayBack Machine like Tumblr does?) but when they go, they’ll take with them an “installed base” of ancient blogroll links the departure of which will be strongly felt by all of the adult sites they ever linked to. It’s going to be a Page Rank bloodbath, for the folks who care about SEO and all that.
The pornocalypse comes for us all, I tell ya.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=10142
It’s only a matter of time before Tumblr falls victim to the yahoo anti porn suits that now control it. While I have a Tumblr that I see as an compliment to my website, anything that is hosted in a third party is always in danger of disappearing. If you run an adult site I agree that hosting it on your own domain is the only way to go. It’s take me a few years to learn the ins and outs of servers and all that that entails but it was worth the effort. Thanks for bringing this to everyone who is hosted on a third party domain or social network, they are in serious danger of being taken down as tyou rightly point out, the porn apocalypse is just around the corner and it’s going to get worse before it gets better…
Well I saw it coming, and I’m damn glad I always hosted all my images on my own domain. I’m saving the text via HTT whatever, but I’ve also saved the better individual posts as text files. Trusting big corporations is just stupid, more so wrt porn.
[…] pornocalypse […]
I run a blogger-hosted blog which has a different focus entirely (role-playing games, of the nonsexual variety with dragons etc.) and doesn’t display any advertisement (at all), but does link to a number of so-called “adult” sites (such as this one) in its blogroll and, further, has a kinky-sounding title just in the interest of being catchy.
Much to my shock, I too have received that e-mail – thus implying that my blog, too, “is identified to have Adult content” (by whom?). In a different context I’d take that as a compliment, considering that my topic of choice is frequently accused of being a childish one (I prefer to think of myself as “artsy”). :D
Instead, I’m left wondering: how does this affect me, specifically? And, more importantly, *HOW DOES ONE BACKUP A BLOGGER SITE*? I consider my blog, small thing as it is, to be a labor of love, and I would totally *HATE* it if some fascist a-holes would erase it from the Internet based on… what? That they don’t like the *title* I chose for it? That they dislike the sites I link to because I like them (sites such as Erosblog)? :(
Erosblog has you covered for backups, just read this post and do as instructed:
http://www.eros...mblr/
The letter says that it is only concerned with monetization of adult blogs, if you don’t have an adult ads or affiliate links, you SHOULD be OK. HOWEVER … this does not mean you WILL be OK, Google is clearly doing this to chase off adult bloggers, they don’t CARE much if you get caught in their nets even if you aren’t an adult blog, so I’d play it safe rather than sorry.
And you know Google’s corporate slogan, “Don’t be evil.” Well, it’s a lie.
My twitter feed tells me this is the link for instructions on backing up your blogger blog: https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/97416
Thank you very much, Bacchus and Pat. I’m going to try these tools out and then, with a backup or three stored somewhere safe, I’ll be soldiering on until Google execs actually come and make my blog a martyr.
These while, of course, I look into some friendlier venues to move my blogging activities (and email account, and other stuff) to… It’s high time I get rid of Google and start following Bacchus’s First Rule.
The blogger tool that Bacchus recommended above is much faster and more compact than the HTT tool he recommends for tumblr sites. The HTT download is at 14+ hours and closing, and had downloaded over ten gigabytes of data. The blogger tool took less than a minute. Difference is, the blogger tool ONLY downloaded the text in my blog, not the images. Which brings up an important caveat: since it’s inception, I have hosted ALL my image files on my own domain. I have not used the blogger image feature, because I never really trusted blotter. If you have been using the blogger image tool instead of writing links to images in other domains, the blogger tool may not save your images for you. It MAY save your images for you, I don’t know. I’d definitely try that blogger tool first, though.
Plus, a peek at what HTT has been downloading shows many images that I KNOW I have never used on my site. Not sure what’s going on there.
The general-purpose web copier tool has settings that control whether it follows links off the domain and copies what it finds at those links (too allow for stuff like copying photos hosted elsewhere). If those links are not set quite right, it may be erroneously following links and copying sites beyond yours — which would also explain the very large size of your download. Ultimately it’s not a problem if it completes — you’ll have your site copied plus a bunch of extra stuff you can throw away — but it can be quite a pain if you’re in a hurry or on limited bandwidth.
I can only comment as a reader of blogs.
Four days notice is evil. I don’t even check my emails that frequently.
[…] Policy, and their intent to remove such sites from the Blogger platform beginning this Sunday. Eros Blog posted the following message that they received from a fan who uses Blogger. I just did a random […]
“…they know not what they do…”
I’ve scrubbed all the affiliate links from my site, very thoroughly. That blogger tool that Bacchus recommended came in very handy for that. After I did the tedious hand-searching of the blog for affiliate links (there were hundreds of them) I knew I must have missed some, as I was half-asleep for a couple of hours while I did it. So I exported the post-removal blog to my computer and opened it in Explorer and did a search for “revshare” text which appears in all of my affiliate links. Turned up just half a dozen links I had missed, which I scrubbed. Handy!
I’m going on the theory that Blogger will use a similar trick for searching out all the blogs that are in violation of it’s new rule, searching all the blogs behind the “adult” wall for affiliate-link keywords or code that appears only in affiliate links. There have to be thousands, more likely tens of thousands of blogs they will have to search. They can probably afford to hire a ton of people to do the work by hand, but it would require a lot of judgment calls.
Of course if their intent is to simply give themselves cover for scrubbing all adult sites, my efforts have been futile. Which is why I’m gonna back up my blog on my own domain next.
[…] today’s the big day — the day that Google has announced it will start deleting adult Blogger (blogspot.com) blogs that have any “monetization of […]
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