We now resume our regular spanking service

Okay! Well, that was scary... and not in that fun, spanky kind of way!

For those who were wondering, my blog was deleted last week, seemingly at random. It's been restored today, a fact I'm VERY grateful for.

As to the reasons for this "temporary service outage"... from what I can tell, Google inexplicably let "robots" scan their blogs to see if they're spam, maliciously coded, etc.

Last week, I installed a custom gadget (with code supplied by Google themselves, ironically) that would let users add my blog to their iGoogle homepages. Minutes later, I was warned of "suspicious activity" on my account and had to restore it. After doing so, I naturally changed my passwords and such... and noticed I had an email saying "your blog has been deleted for MALICIOUS JAVASCRIPT".

Yes. Just like that, it was gone.

Of course, there was no contact address in the email, and any "Contact Us" link on Google or Blogger just says "post in the relevant help forum". Needless to say, I did, and eventually got help from a very hard-working forum mod/helper (thanks again, Nitecruzr!) who escalated my request to restore my blog - or at least contact me! - to Blogger Team.

Days ticked on, and after still no word from Google themselves, I decided to politely ask on the help forum again today... but even as I did so, I found my blog had been restored this morning!

Fingers, toes and paddles all crossed this isn't a temporary or random reprieve. Needless to say, a hard lesson is learned about customizing this blog further, though.

I'm used to censorship, but it seems this wasn't the case here... just someone sending a robot (i.e. automated script) to do a person's job! Is it ironic that my blog seems to have been unjustly branded as a "malicious script" by a malicious script?

In any case, it's good to be back, and a huge thanks to everyone who posted on my old group (where I kept updating on the situation this past week) or emailed me in support.

As an aside... I don't know how many people notice, but the URL on all my artwork and downloads is actually www.banjosbbs.cjb.net which is a "redirect". That's for a very good reason: in case something like this happens!!! If my site(s) ever disappear, that URL will always point to my most current "home", or else a a notification page or contact point. Just something to note (and bookmark), folks!