get this man some soap for his potty mouth
OR
Won’t Someone Please Think Of The Children?
OR
You Can’t Say That On The Internets!
the more-or-less absolutely true tale of how my old site was suspended
Friday before last I logged into my website before going to work to see if I’d had any comments. Dave had left one, and I left a reply; I skimmed over my feeds in Bloglines for a few minutes, glossing over some of the news and noting who among the bloggers I follow had updated. The Internet was largely as I had left it when I’d gone to bed a few hours before.
The work morning went along quickly enough, and a little after ten I dropped down by the cafe in my building for a coffee refill, and to use the PC in the lobby to check my site. I was more than a little surprised to find that instead of the regular colors of my blog I found a splash page from my web host announcing that my account had been disabled. I hit refresh a couple of times, thinking this must be some sort of error. When my site failed to resolve, I logged into my email, and found an email from the support desk of what shall hereafter be known as ‘PuritanHost’ with the subject line ACCOUNT SUSPENDED. “Oh, great,” I thought. I clicked on the email, which was short and to the point.
You web-hosting account has been deactivated (reason: call customer support). Although your website has been disabled, your data may still be available.
If you feel this deactivation was in error, please contact customer service as soon as possible.
Well, no shit I felt this deactivation was in error. I dialed the 800 number for PuritanHost listed in the email, and spent several minutes on hold wondering what had happened. It wasn’t like I used my site to do anything illegal. I ran through any number of increasingly implausible scenarios: someone had hacked my account passwords and set up email accounts to send out spam; a malicious script had been introduced to my page; my ftp server had been loaded full of movies by the Russian Mafia to be downloaded by data pirates in Malabar; my site had been demolished by script kiddies and they’d put up a picture of goat$e in its place.
Finally the help desk took my call. The agent on the other end of the line asked for my domain; I gave it to him.
“Uh huh. Okay. What can I do for you today?”
“Well, my account has been deactivated.”
“Okay.”
“I’d like to get it reactivated.”
“Okay. Hmm. Okay. Looks like your account was suspended.”
“Right. Can you tell me why?”
“Uhh, it looks like you used, ah, vulgarity?”
I blinked. Blinked again. Surely I must have heard him incorrectly. “Say again?”
“You, ah, have vulgarity on your site.”
I took a second to process that. “Yeah. Is that illegal?”
“Well, it’s against the Terms of Service.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah, it’s in there.”
“FUCK.”
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing. Look, okay, look, how do we go about remedying this? I want to get my site back up and running.”
“Well…you can remove the vulgarities you used. Sir.”
“Okay,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “Okay. Listen, what’s the story? I’ve been with you guys for over a year now. What set this off? Were there complaints about my site?” Even as I said this I found it hard to believe. I’m hardly Andrew Dice Clay; I run a fairly innocuous little site for my own amusement, and I drop the occasional F-bomb, but who doesn’t?
“Uh, well, no. I mean, I don’t see that there are any records of any complaints.”
“If there weren’t any complaints, then what set this off? What was the trigger?”
“Well…sometimes we go through the domains that we host. You know. Just to be sure.” And he might have said some more words by way of explanation, but I didn’t hear them. It turns out that as with other forms of sub-lethal trauma, the human brain will black out once absurdity reaches a certain critical level, to save your head from imploding. This is what happened to me as I began to contemplate the fact that, in a world where you can dig up some pretty sick and twisted stuff on the Internet with a minimum of effort, my web host had gone through the trouble to scan through my entire site to make sure that I wasn’t USING ANY NAUGHTY LANGUAGE.
“Fine,” I said abruptly as I returned to consciousness. “I’ll take care of it and call you back.” And by “take care of it”, I meant “pack up all my files and move them to another host without a completely bullshit acceptable use policy.”
That’s why my site has been down this last week. Jenny recommended Laughing Squid, and I zipped up my database tables and pulled all my theme files and have spent the last few days porting everything over to its new home. I haven’t got everything quite the way it was yet — I’ve gotten rid of some old plug-ins and updated others and still need to do a little more configuring before all is as it was. So, bear with me.
There are worse things in life than having your site 86ed by your host because you aren’t always PG-13, but it was still pretty annoying.
Think me getting my site shut down for ‘off-color language’ is a bunch of bullshit? Please feel free to exercise your right to free speech in my comments.
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