e-Mergency

Remember back in the early 1990s, when all those nimrods (the ones who brought us the dotCom Boom, and later, the dotCom Bust) put "e-" in front of everything that had to do with the Internet? It was e-insipid, but so are those e-people. Most of them went on to manage American banks and auto makers. Anyway, that's what inspired this e-post.

If you have tried accessing The Cyberculturalist since, like, flipping Wednesday of last week, you've noticed it goes straight to a "parked" page on the registrar. That's because, for whatever reason, Google thought it was "spam" and suspended it. This happened without notice or warning, like I say, sometime Wednesday or Thursday morning.

About that same time, I received a fraudulent e-mail saying I'd made a purchase from Cartoon Network and needed to send my banking information to confirm. But, if I hadn't made the purchase, then I needed to download the attached program and run it to clear my account. Heh. "Clear my account" it most certainly would have!

I mention this because Google doesn't tell you why, nor how, they came to the conclusion that your site or blog was spam, they just suspend it and they're done. "Fuck you, whores!" Google says before it cracks the whip and forces you back to creating content to which it can lay claim.

However, I was having issues with the domain because it was registered one place and hosted on another. Long story short, that's why you landed on the old man page whenever you clicked one of the old links. I tried like hell to fix it - even called for technical help from my host - but could never figure it out. I had some idea I was going about the whole thing wrong (I was), but... it was just confusing because of the order in which things had been done and the fact that my host didn't want to help me set it up correctly through my registrar and vice-versa. Having worked technical support, I both understand and hate that: OTOH, the tech might not know my registrar's configuration and so forth; however, he's probably just trying to end the call. Like I'm really going to sue someone or whatever... Of course, there are a lot of assholes out there (look at how many people work for Google!), so I'm also certain somebody would.

Anyway, once Google told me I'd done a bad thing, well then figured out I hadn't, it erased all my settings. I tried correcting the whole mess myself, but couldn't figure it out any better at that point than I could before... I had company for the weekend, so I let the whole thing drift until today; I'm working on that right now.

After this, I have to call around to find the best price on DSL. Yay! I already know it's going to cost a pretty penny, though - my excitement is tempered by this knowledge.

Lucky for me Google's spam recognition is just as good as its search algorithm!

© C Harris Lynn, 2009