Lost and found.

I've had this blog since 2005. I've written on it at least every month since March 2007 (hey happy 15th anniversary of monthly posts, no fixed abode!). In that time I've written about everything and nothing, about the personal, the political, Occupy, rainbows, HIV, climate change, graffiti, street art, gigs, travels, staying at home, stuff in the street and stuff in the sky. Sometimes I write considered and carefully researched long texts that are heartfelt but somewhat incoherent rants about world affairs, the news of the day and life and death issues close to my heart. Other times I post a pretty picture of a sunset or the sea that I took on my phone sometime in the previous month. I call out by name politicians and other people I don't know, but never name people close to me, I write about controversial topics and inconsequential trivia, I manage to express what I think and utterly fail to. I overuse the word somewhat. A few friends used to read my blog, I'd say my maximum readership was about 15, except perhaps a few more than that when I posted daily about Occupy for a while in 2011. I got a few comments from people I knew, fewer from people I didn't, and a handful of spam comments over a decade and a half. Nowadays no-one reads this blog, not even my closest friends. It's hard to find on the web even if you search for it by name. I don't know why I write it, why I keep writing it, and why I don't think more about why I write it and come up with a proper reason or stop doing it. But I keep doing it. And no-one notices. It's essentially invisible. And that's okay. In fact it's fine by me. I write about whatever big or small thing I want, once a month, usually just about getting it published at 23.59 on the last day of each month, no-one reads it, and I forget about it until the next month. But this month, something odd happened.

This month, I got an email from Blogger saying my blog had been removed. Blogger is the Google service that my blog is, still, on. Blogger said my blog had been "flagged to us for review", they had determined that it "violates our guidelines", specifically their SPAM policy, and they had made it unavailable to blog readers. This was the email:

Hello, As you may know, our Community Guidelines (https://blogger.com/go/contentpolicy) describe the boundaries for what we allow-- and don't allow-- on Blogger. Your blog titled "http://lusciousblopster.blogspot.com/" was flagged to us for review. We have determined that it violates our guidelines and have made the URL http://lusciousblopster.blogspot.com/ unavailable to blog readers. Why was your blog removed? Your content has violated our SPAM policy. Please visit our Community Guidelines page linked in this email to learn more. If we feel that a blog's content does not fit within the expectations of our Policy, we no longer allow it to be publicly available. If you think we've made a mistake, you can request a review at .... and we'll take another look. Sincerely, -The Blogger Team

At first I thought this email was itself spam. But no, it was genuine. I checked and my blog had vanished. 17 years of posts were no longer there.

So that was odd.

I clicked on the link in the email to request a review. It immediately brought me to a page saying that as I had clicked on the link, I was probably not a robot. That I was probably a human who cared about their blog. That the process of content review on the web was prone to mistakes. And that the removal of my blog would be reviewed. A few minutes later, I received another email, saying my blog had been reinstated. I checked and there it was, all fine, as if it had never been gone, all the years of rambling and rants and research had been restored. From first email to second, about 90 minutes had elapsed. So probably the blog was only inaccessible for that hour and a half. Except for me, I'm confident no-one, but no-one, noticed.

Except that someone had. Someone, or really some bot programmed to look for certain things, had noticed my blog, and had flagged it to be removed. Why would that happen? To a blog almost no-one reads, that is hard to find, but which a cursory glance would tell you is definitely and obviously not spam. What had happened to interrupt my blog's quiet-to-the-point-of-whispered 17 year existence? All the things I've written about over the years, and suddenly this little hiatus happens? I tried to remember what I'd written about in my last post, in February. I couldn't remember. Could it have seemed like spam? I looked more closely at my blog myself. There was my post from 28th February. And what was it about?

The Ukraine war.

So there's that.