WordPress .com….deleting adult blogs??

Hot on the heels of the Blogger debacle wherein Blogspot.com owners were given less than a week to remove ads and affiliate links from their adult blog, WordPress.com gets in on the action.

Unlike Google/Blogger, though, WordPress.com gave no notice. Literally out of nowhere, it was noticed that some blogs were disappearing and in their place was a TOS violation notice from WordPress.com. While WordPress.com was never an ideal option for any sex blogger who also wanted to review sex toys, due to them saying that they would never allow advertising or affiliate links, plenty of sexy-words-n-photos bloggers still clung to the free landscape of WordPress.com.

Unfortunately for everyone, there is a lot of confusion about well…..everything.  First of all, what exactly did these bloggers do to violate TOS? We don’t know yet. If they find out, I’ll update it here.

Second, since WordPress is what most self-hosted bloggers are using, confusion again arises. Are you at risk because of that?

Nope. WordPress.com is the Blogger/Blogspot/Livejournal equivalent. It’s free, you’re limited in what you can do to tweak it, but they’ll of course offer you the ability to buy a domain, get rid of the “wordpress.com” part of your blog’s address, and you’re completely bound by their TOS. The Toyswap Network’s public “face” is on a WordPress.com account. This blog here is “powered by” WordPress, and I’m fine.

If you’re under the thumb of WordPress.com, your dashboard likely looks like this:

If you’re self-hosted, this means that you went to someplace like Hostgator or Dreamhost or GoDaddy, you bought your domain and hosting, and you *installed* WordPress. WordPress is a Content Management System. This is also referred to as “WordPress.org”, because in order to get support or plugins, you need a WordPress.org account. This is what your dashboard may look like in part:

Basically, the company/person who can have any control and say over what you, their guest, can post is the host. In this situation, WordPress.com is the host. WordPress as a CMS is NOT a host, it is an application that is downloaded and installed. When you bought your domain, you had nothing but an html file. Until you (or the host) installed WordPress.

We (the folks at Automattic) run a blog and web site hosting service called WordPress.com and would love for you to use it. Our basic service is free, and we offer paid upgrades for advanced features such as domain hosting and extra storage. Our service is designed to give you as much control and ownership over what goes on your site as possible and encourage you to express yourself freely. However, be responsible in what you publish. In particular, make sure that none of the prohibited items listed below appear on your site or get linked to from your site (things like spam, viruses, or hate content).

Today, we assumed that people’s blogs were being yanked because of adult content. But, it’s actually been against TOS since 2009 to have “pornographic content”.  The only recent change to the TOS, visible in the TOS Change Log at the end of the page, is “June 12, 2013: Edited “Attribution” paragraph to specify that footer credits and the WordPress.com toolbar may not be altered.”. I doubt that this is the reason.

Things become fuzzy even more because WordPress.com offered a few services for a steep upcharge to people who were too intimidated to go seek out hosting and such. It allowed you to buy your domain, and some other services, to get rid of the “wordpress.com” part of your blog address. These people are still at risk. The “host” is still a company who is against a fuck ton of shit.

One other blogger, The Sin Doll, briefly had her blog pulled. We couldn’t figure out why, until a who.is revealed that despite being self-hosted, her host, Gandi, uses wordpress.com nameservers.  This could be the reason. It’s got to be the reason, since there is no other. Sure, she bought a theme from WordPress, but that’s a theme. That’s not control over your content. Only your host has that control. Unless the domain butts in…..which maybe it did. It makes no sense. 

Anyways.

Look at your dashboard. Can you see this -> “You are using WordPress 3.5.2.”? And did you go to someplace like GoDaddy, HostGator, DreamHost, etc and purchase a domain, hosting, etc? YOU’RE FINE. If you can look at your dashboard though and see “Store” in the left menu? You’re not fine. Go get thee self-hosted, STAT. And back that shit up.