Special Blog Post: Deleted and Republished

The post published immediatately prior to this one was entitled, "Cat and Mouse with the VA (Score One for the Cat)." That article was cross-posted at Big Brass Blog, as well as at The UnCapitalist Journal.

The post in its original form was deleted from both this Website and from Big Brass Blog some time in the late morning or early afternoon on June 17, 2006. Later that afternoon, when I saw what had occurred, I reposted an article with the same title, but instead of reposting the original content, I provided a statement of what had been done. Because of the high probability that the original post had been deleted due to something in the content, I chose to delete it myself from The UnCapitalist Journal, even though nothing had happened there to my knowledge. The telling part is that both this Weblog and Big Brass Blog use Blogger as their publishing service. The UnCapitalist Journal does not. Unlike almost all Weblogs publishing through Blogger, both The Dark Wraith Forums and Big Brass Blog are hosted on private servers instead of on the free, Blogger servers; however, The Dark Wraith Forums and Big Brass Blog do not use the same Webhost. In fact, their servers are completely unrelated other than that both are on the Internet. Blogger has permissions to access the domains dark-wraith.com and www.bigbrassblog.com, but it is only supposed to do so on command of the owner of the Website: the command may be to publish, to edit, or to delete a post or to modify the template (the "index" file) for the Website. Blogger has no permission whatsoever to enter private servers on its own.

There have been many, many instances of Blogger deleting bloggers' posts. Most of the incidents have to do with blogs that are on Blogger's own servers. Whether those were technical glitches or deliberate acts of censorship by the administrators at Blogger, I do not know; but a case could be made that content on Blogger servers is subject to review by the staff of that service provided by Google.

Under no circumstances would such right of review extend to Web content on private servers unrelated to Blogger and paid for by the Webmasters, themselves. In such instances, the staff at Blogger would have no business whatsoever entering the domain and altering files in the absence of a direct command by the site owner/administrator.

What happened here at The Dark Wraith Forums and at Big Brass Blog could have been a technical error arising at Blogger's servers, a false command that caused some Blogger program to reach into private servers and selectively delete files. How that could have happened to only two of hundreds of files—and to the same post on two completely different, unconnected servers in separate parts of the country at nearly the same time on the same day—challenges the credibility of a claim that it was a technical glitch. It is still, however, theoretically possible that this is the explanation.

Personally, I doubt it. Although The Dark Wraith Forums is a small, trivial blog in the backwaters of what is now approaching a total number blogs of maybe 30 million, there were several things about the article that could have triggered a judgment that it should be deleted. One point in particular was the graphic, deliberately low resolution and subject to redaction as it was: it has been suggested to me that the graphic could have been interpreted as violating the law against private use of government documents. The envelope had printed on it: "Penalty for private use $300" as depicted in the graphic at left.

Whatever. And bite me.

The Dark Wraith Forums will be leaving the loving family of Blogger's millions of Weblogs within the next several weeks. Once I have completed that arduous and long-overdue task, I shall publish an article here in which no words will be minced about Blogger or its parent, Google. In fact, I shall do everything within my power to ensure that Google scrubs this site from its search engine, which I am certain it will do considering it is entirely happy to self-censor on behalf of Google.cn, the Chinese version of its service. I consider it my small contribution to Google's journey into the 21st Century as yet one more promise of the Internet that turned into just one more brick in the wall of repression creeping, country by country and mind by mind, across the world.


Below is the link to the original article, reconstructed with the comments, thanks to the dedication of PoliShifter of Pissed on Politics, who tracked down a cached version of the post complete with the comments still embedded. I deleted from my server the graphic in the original post, so that will appear as a broken image call in the article. A few other minor oddities will be evident because the post is no longer bound to the architecture of the articles of The Dark Wraith Forums, but the post and comments are, nevertheless, intact (although you should probably not try to post further comments on that version of the article; post them here, instead).

Even the story in those original comments about the marmelade cat survived. The Dark Wraith is glad for that. So without further blather, herewith is the link to the original post, repaired as necessary after going through the meat grinder of cacheing:

Cat and Mouse with the VA (Score One [Actually, Score Two]) for the Cat.


The Dark Wraith is a rather happy, if still somewhat rattled, individual tonight.