A Blogger.com Horror Story: Blogger deletes my blogs!

I'll die! No, of course not. But I'm mad!

I found out this alternative online ad network to Google's AdSense--AdBrite--and I started installing one, only one, ad zone in one of my blogs. A little later, Blogger.com sends me an email that this blog has been deleted for "malicious java script"! Hello! I do not even know java script (remember, it's unTechie here who's writing). Pretty soon, Blogger.com started deleting each one of my other blogs! This was turning out to be a horror story. And it was not the end--all of a sudden the email which is also what I use for my blogger account was suspended, deleted, put on hold, whatever! It was like a mystery man hitting me from all sides.

What would you do in these cases? I did not know. If Gmail itself did not just as suddenly show me a page (I do not remember how) allowing me to "restore" my email, I really would not have known what to do. Again, a little later after that, when I tried to login into my blogger account, only the first deleted blog remained deleted while the rest were back to normal. But obviously, someone and something were not normal here.

So I uninstalled the AdBrite ads, clicked the "Restore" button on my deleted blog and Blogger shows me a message saying I am "probably human" since I was reading that message and therefore, that my blog was probably not a "spam blog". It said that it was sorry for the "false positive" and that it was going to review my blog. Well, two days have passed and it still has not been restored nor has Blogger given me more feedback on it.

Like all horror stories, this does not end with the first scare. Naively thinking that it was probably the long name and URL that I chose for that deleted blog which made it seem like a spam blog (how's that again? Containing "malicious java script"!), I thought Blogger.com acted really bad on that one, and that AdBrite was probably innocent. So I tried installing AdBrite again, a little 1 column x 3 text links, on my blogs--all except one and the other one that was pending restoration.

The same horrific thing soon happened. Blogger.com showed on my dashboard that all these blogs were deleted (with the now-familiar "restore" button). I clicked that button on each of the affected blogs. The same message appeared for each. I went to the Gmail account I use with this Blogger account and, voila!, a message for each deleted blog was in my inbox, each saying the same thing: my blog contains "malicious java script"!

Is AdBrite doing something fishy with the codes they give for posting on the blogs? I emailed them asking this. Let's see what they will say.

Or, is it AdSense that does not like any form of competition on their blogs? After all, it is all Google's: Gmail, Blogger, and AdSense.

It is just scary how Google can just take away what you have and give you robot-generated explanations which you cannot understand while you are left at their mercy--because if Blogger itself did not provide me with those restore buttons, what could I have done? And really, now, what can I do?

Oh, blogger!

UPDATE (2 July 2010):

Here is AdBrite's answer:

What's wrong with Google's AdSense?

The other day I just expressed my preference for Blogger. But since Blogger is Google's and Google's AdSense is an expected way of monetizing your blog at Blogger, today I have to say that Google's forums are lousy.

I have been trying since yesterday to add and/or modify the AdSense ads in my different blogs and every time I click the save button, this error message comes out: "Please correct errors on this form" and "An internal error occurred. Please try again."

Even for non-techies like us the window for configuring AdSense is really quite simple and so I tried "correcting" whatever else could possibly be corrected. I also, as it said, "tried again" many times on the different blogs. I even closed the browser, tried different browsers (Firefox and Chrome), and restarted the laptop. Nada.

I checked out Google's AdSense forum and discovered that during these days, there have actually been quite a number of people with the same problem. Worse, Google does not seem to offer any solution. In the forum I only see users complaining and a few suggesting solutions. I understand that Google's a huge company, but since it's the millions of little people like us who patronize it and make it profitable, I would expect there would be some kind of forum expert or administrator who would try providing answers. But it seems that is not to be expected. So if any of you knows how to get around this, I would really be thankful and dedicate a post to it.

Let me not let this drag on and instead, switch to a different but still related topic. The best and most interactive forum I have found so far--and also by my judgement, the friendliest to non-techies and newbies--is the Ubuntu Forum. I just love it. You can actually count on both administrators and fellow users. And impressively, they help for the sake of helping. Cheers!

UPDATE:
On Monday, I realized that it was the AdSense widget that was not working. I was going about posting ads the long way, that is, logging into my AdSense account and creating and editing my ads units there and then copying the code and pasting it into this blog (go to your blog's Dashboard>Layout>Add a Gadget).

I tried the Adsense widgets again today and now it is working. Whatever happened the past days continues to be a mystery.