Blogging Woes 1: The Beginning of the Spin-Off Saga
Our blogging experience has been at times a tumultuous one. Our first clash with Blogger's reporting policy was when a now unpublished post, Kinky Weekend: Kinky Match, which compared 4 kinky movies (Hellraiser, Love and Leashes, Fifty Shades of Grey, and 365 Days), was flagged as too spicy to be seen without checking your age first. This is made by logging into one's Google account, and how many people are willing to do that for a random blog post? Judging by how the views instantly stopped after that, we're guessing not many. Our second clash was a little more serious.
SPAM?!
Some idiot of limited reading comprehension who nevertheless was able to understand Blogger’s reporting instructions, reported the Comics page (basically the same as Our Books) as violating Blogger’s spam policy. If you’re wondering what that is, here:
Do not spam. This may include unwanted promotional or commercial content, unwanted content that is created by an automated program, unwanted repetitive content, nonsensical content or anything that appears to be a mass solicitation.
We were very honest about why we created the The Snarky Cats of Ulthar blog in the first place - to promote our digital comic book series. The Comics page was only accessible by clicking the link on the navigation menu, and we included that link in our About page and in a post about the series, both of which explained what the page was. So, its contents weren’t visible to anyone who just happened to find themselves on the blog’s homepage or clicked on a link to a specific post that turned up in their online search - you had to actively seek it out. And, yet, someone was so terribly offended by it that they went to the trouble of reporting it to Blogger. Even worse? Blogger agreed with the idiot and hid the page from visitors. The only way to restore it was to make changes. Of course, changing the page would render it useless, so we opted to simply delete it. The weirdest thing about this situation was that when this happened, the page had only had 11 views, and that for a long time. So, how long did it take Blogger to review it? Or did the reporting idiot not even read it? Guess we’ll never know. Ironically, our Featured Post at the time, which was an overview of the series, probably fit the 'unwanted promotional content' part, but it seems no one noticed. We had always been aware of Blogger’s ability to delete a troublesome blog, but we never thought that that might be a problem for us. After the Comics page situation, we started to get worried. Moving the whole blog didn’t seem like a good idea, but we didn’t want to delete all the potentially problematic posts just to avoid having some cyber Karen report them and get the whole blog shut down. The answer? A spin-off blog! This was the beginning of a saga that came to a close very recently, which spawned more than one blog post + several angry tweets, and included a clash with WordPress.com's Mature Content guidelines.
A GOAT 4 ZAZZIE
We decided to give this spin-off the name of our social media handle because we're terrible at coming up with names. The posts to be transferred included not only Kinky Match, but also any post featuring more sexual content that we feared might become a problem in the future. As we went through posts, a new idea began to form: why not use this opportunity to make the main blog more thematically consistent? We knew we couldn't transfer the Sleepless Society reviews, though we really wanted to, because those were practically the only posts to generate search clicks (they still are, which is pretty annoying), but there were others that wouldn't make much of a difference. Still, we didn't want the spin-off to be a pile of trash assembled by a mad raccoon, so we tried to create some consistency there, too. Along with the spicier posts, we sent the ones about religious horror, the Apocalypse, Bible snark, and Peter Thiel. Ironically, though they were the reason why we decided to do the spin-off in the first place, the spicier posts were the ones that didn't fit in.
After some googling about free blogging platforms, we decided on Wix. At a time when people were already starting to boycott it, because we have great timing. Wix allows a lot more customization than Blogger by separating all the various elements of the blog’s structure, which in turn makes things seem a lot more complex than they should be. Even our first blog was simpler. The fact that we stupidly deleted some of those elements when we started working on the theme before noticing this really didn’t help… So, we had to replace them by adding all those elements again, which involved adding a blank section to the homepage and then placing the necessary elements inside that section (and no, we’re not going to say how long it took us to figure that out). For instance, to have that perfectly normal setup of a Featured Post ahead of a list of other posts, we were surprised to find out that we had to have one section with a Post List set to 'show featured post only' (or something close to it) and a separate section below for all the recent posts. Both Blogger and our original WordPress blog only required picking a post to pin to the top of the post list. Of course, Blogger blogs have the same elements. When we hit More Posts here, we go to the Blog Page, and when we click on a post link, we go to the Post Page. However, they’re just there. Honestly, our experiences with the 3 blog builders make us wonder if all those blog platform reviewers have a different concept of 'easy' and 'intuitive'… Once we figured out how everything worked, though, we were pretty happy with the results. Sadly, we didn't keep a screenshot of that iteration of A Goat 4 Zazzie. Wix does have some fun, easier-to-handle elements, like the video app. We decided to add a whole page to showcase some of the videos we made for Instagram and created a video channel (the mode which allows you to show more than one video) called Cosmic Horror. It also allows you to easily change the background of the 'blocks', unlike WordPress... In fact, we were so happy, that we even foolishly wrote at the time that if we'd been better informed, we would've opted for either Wix or WordPress.com instead of Blogger. Needless to say, things didn't go well.
Even though we were doing the exact same thing for the main blog, the spin-off got 0 views. We've since become a little more suspicious of Blogger stats, but even if they're somewhat inflated, 0 views is just crazy. What was the problem? The boycott? The very intrusive URL? We still don't know, but decided that since WordPress.com was the most popular blogging platform, we might have better luck there. So, we decided that dealing with those horrible blocks was worth it and moved our spin-off. The long-gone first blog was also created with WordPress, though not only was it self-hosted, which came with more options, but we also had no idea what we were doing, so we were less aware of whatever limitations there were. The WordPress.com Free Plan has lots of those. Most of the free Themes are fugly and of the few that are more presentable, many have horrid colour schemes and fonts that can only be changed if you upgrade to a paid plan. There’s a DIY option that allows you to pick the blog elements separately and combine them the way you want, but that freedom is somewhat deceptive as you can still be surprised by a simple colour change being flagged as a premium feature that requires a paid plan. We tried to make it work several times, but in the end gave up and picked a pre-made Theme (Baskerville 2). By the way, if you’re thinking you can circumvent all that with a little coding, forget it - people using the Free Plan aren’t allowed that sort of in depth modifications. The attempt to make the blog look nicer by having the Homepage be a static page rather than the latest posts had mixed results. You can't change a single page background colour without it affecting the blog’s overall look (if there is a way that doesn’t require coding, apologies for our abject ignorance), or get rid of those stupid white margins that surround the page. On top of that, for some reason, every image is given a white frame, including PNG ones. Since the only reason we started saving some images as PNG was to get rid of the background, you can imagine how happy we were with that little quirk.
You can see how it turned out above. Of course, WordPress isn’t just about (not so) pretty blog Themes - there’s also their infamous text editor. You know, the one that forces you to add a Spacer Block anytime you want to make a paragraph… We hated it the first time and we hated it the second time, and we simply cannot understand why WordPress hasn’t done anything to fix it. By the way, we tried writing posts on a tablet and dealing with the Blocks on a smaller screen was a nightmare. Who the hell ever thought this could be a good idea? Who? Ugh! However, as much as we hate those damned Blocks, they weren’t the reason why A Goat 4 Zazzie ended up back on Blogger.
Because Kinky Match had already been flagged by Blogger, and we had other naughtier posts, we decided to self-report A Goat 4 Zazzie as 'adult'. This cut us off from the larger WordPress.com community. We got more than 0 views, but they were still abysmal. That didn't seem to matter for Google Search Console who, shockingly, decided to index all the posts. Bing, on the other hand, wasn't even able to read the sitemap, which is why we didn't bother submitting anything else to them. We even published Tim's Winter Adventure there first, but no one bothered checking it out, despite all the social media posts, which included Twitter, Instagram, and Bluesky. We thought that if we could just access the WordPress.com community, everything would be fine. So, we reverted the posts with more sexual content to draft, leaving only the religious horror reviews, the biblical snark, the Apocalypse, and the posts about Peter Thiel. There were also the Making Of posts about our books, which, naturally, had panels from each digital comic. Tim’s Winter Adventure had already been deleted because of the whole AI thing (yes, we ticked the Not Allowed box, but better safe than sorry), though there were still some pages left in the Media Library, which we didn’t think would be a problem - after all, no one else can see it, right? So, this is all that was published when we contacted WordPress.com and asked for the blog to be unmarked as Mature - they refused.
MATURE CONTENT
Their reply was surprising. First, we weren’t even sure if they were going to reply, as we used the form for suspended blogs, second, it never crossed our minds that the answer might be negative. Oh, and thirdly, they also checked the Media Library. WTF? The Media Library?! We initially felt we were being victims of the thought police since what should matter is what’s on the blog. After some googling, we realized the situation could be a little more disturbing. No, the Media Library isn’t public, but it seems that you can get the link through one of the images posted from there and then can use it to access it? We have no idea if this still applies as most of the stuff we usually find on the WordPress.com forum is from years ago, but it would be a reason for them to check it, too. Why that is, however, we just don’t understand. In theory, everyone has the link to our dashboard because all the links have the same format, but no one can access it without a password. Shouldn’t that apply to the Media Library as well? And if it does, why the hell would what’s in it influence the classification of the corresponding blog? Still, the reply made it clear that the problem wasn’t any sexual content that might’ve been left there, even though it didn’t go into specifics. These are WordPress.com's Mature Content guidelines:
We do permit mature content on WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress sites connected to Jetpack, including text, images and videos that contain nudity, offensive language, and mature subject material. However, websites that contain such content must be marked as Mature in our system.
So, no, sexual content isn’t the only thing that’s considered Mature. There are, of course, limits and things that are absolutely forbidden and could get a blog suspended or even banned. Clearly, our situation wasn’t that bad. We’re guessing the problem was the violence in some of the digital comic book panels/pages (we probably shouldn’t have shanked Santa), but the truth is that we have no idea. Our first reaction was to delete all the WIP Talk posts, leaving only the one about the series as a whole, and whatever pages and panels from removed posts that were still in the Media Library. We also permanently deleted those posts so they’d be completely gone. However, the more we thought about those guidelines and the rest of the blog, the more unsure we felt. Would the review of End of Days (1999) (that you can now read here), which mentions the Devil stabbing someone on the head, be considered too violent? Does the occasional swearing count as 'offensive language'? What exactly are 'mature subjects'? We looked for concrete examples, but couldn’t find any. Yes, we could’ve kept trying, but ultimately we decided that starting some back-and-forth with WordPress.com about what did or didn't qualify as Mature Content just wasn't worth it. Naturally, Blogger has its own adult content guidelines:
We do allow adult content on blogger, including images or videos that contain nudity or sexual activity. If your blog contains adult content, please mark it as ‘adult’ in your blogger settings. We may also mark blogs with adult content where the owners have not. All blogs marked as ‘adult’ will be placed behind an ‘adult content’ warning interstitial. If your blog has a warning interstitial, please do not attempt to circumvent or disable the interstitial - it is for everyone’s protection.
That sounds a little dramatic and it also fails to mention that the interstitial forces people to sign into their Google accounts to verify their ages. If applied only to the more extreme cases, this isn't a problem. If not, this can end up giving a very wrong idea about the blog’s contents and drive people away. Let’s face it, most people would just look for a simpler alternative. Though, unlike WordPress, Blogger does allow porn and at least it sounds like they’re trying to cover their own asses if someone decides to sue them for shit that is very much their own individual responsibility. While their definition of ‘adult content’ doesn’t appear to be limited to sexual content, it feels that maybe Blogger is more focused on that (hopefully, we won’t have to add an update after one of the blogs is flagged as ‘adult’ due to too many fucks and the baby-eating lizard person). Despite all these warnings, we have a hard time believing every single blog in the WordPress.com community or Blogger is completely devoid of any trace of what each considers Mature Content. Maybe people just don't snitch on each other?
PG 13 BLOGGING
All these safeguards made a little more sense after we managed to dig up the minimum age requirements for WordPress.com (we couldn’t find the ones for Blogger, though we’re fairly certain we have already seen them and they’re the same). So, the minimum age requirement to join is 13 (in the US, in Europe it’s 16, which is pretty ironic). WTF? 13?! Naturally, anyone under 18 must have parental supervision. But why the hell does a 13 year old need a whole blog? Go to Tumblr or Instagram, FFS! Are there problems on social media platforms? YES. But much of it comes from an appalling lack of parental supervision, ignorance about the most basic forms of online safety (do NOT post personal information, OR arrange to meet any of those strangers you call your online friends but really know nothing about), and not using the tools (blocking, private accounts) at their disposal. If WordPress.com and Blogger are so interested in getting that younger crowd, why don’t they create a space just for them, leaving all the adults who know that eating fast food for a year is bad for you to themselves? Really, how many underage bloggers are there in both platforms that just adding a warning to a blog isn't enough? And how difficult is to offer some parental controls to block the underage blogger from accessing those blogs? Unless there's no way to fully control said blogger's interactions with the platform and it's all dependent on the parent actually doing supervision, which seems risky and is a very good reason not to allow such young users in the first place.
THE SNARKY CATS OF ULTHAR: SPICY EDITION
Remember those naughty posts we unpublished? Well, we could’ve just deleted them, but we didn’t want to lose them. Therefore, we created yet another blog, a spin-off of a spin-off where we transferred them to - The Snarky Cats of Ulthar: Spicy Edition. For our 3rd blog, we opted for a much simpler Theme (Twenty Twenty), which came with a pre-made static Homepage page. Weirdly, that didn't fix the whole margins issue. The top margin disappeared, but then we got stuck with a white bar between the page's contents and the Footer, which we solved by adding a white Group Block to the top of the page to make it look more symmetric. Hey, if you can't beat them... In this static page that served as the blog's Homepage, we put a warning with a button that was the only way to access the blog, which in turn was the only place where you could find the Tags and Archive. We also didn't have any social media links anywhere except the About page, which was the only page on the Navigation Menu. This Theme doesn’t show the blog name at the top, which made everything look super secretive. We thought it was pretty funny and that anyone who stumbled upon the blog would be very disappointed.
THE END?
We left Spicy Edition behind due to Blogger's interstitial, and brought A Goat 4 Zazzie back here. This should've been the end of the WordPress adventure, but we weren't ready to quit yet. Because we're clearly idiots.
