I had planned on writing a post on war films and aesthetics, but this was not to be. At least not today. Instead, I spent my blogging time today in a much different manner.

I started my personal  philosophy blog,  “A Philosopher’s Blog” in 2007  and managed to build up a modest audience ( 200-600 views per day). That all came to an end today when I learned Wordpress.com had suspended my account this morning. As per their TOS, they can do this without warning and without providing any opportunity to correct any alleged violation. They even take a total destruction approach:  a suspended user cannot even recover past posts.

I actually have no idea what I did to violate their TOS. Really. In fact, there are cases in which this problem arises and the person has not actually violated the TOS.

I did find that I was able to get access to my other Wordpress.com blogs by getting my password reset. Of course, my philosophy blog was gone. Fortunately, I had just backed up my site recently and was able to import it with only a few bugs. I’ll have to go through and manually sort out issues with tags and categories, but at least the posts and comments are intact. I was also able to use Google’s cache feature to recover the text from blogs that had been posted since my last backup.

While I did like Wordpress.com, I was not very pleased with how this alleged TOS violation was handled. But, as their page indicates, if you use their service then you are stuck with their rules. However, I am certainly not happy about losing my readership.

Update 3/11/2010

Like many bloggers, I use Zemanta to automate a lot of tedious chores, such as creating tags for posts and links within blogs. When I used Zemanta to create links in my blog on health care, it created a link to a diet pill web site that is on the “proscribed list” for Wordpress.com. Thus, my blog was suspended. As I write this, I can see that Zemanta is ready to stick in the link to the diet pill site again. Obviously, I won’t be using Zemanta to create links anymore.

If your account is suspended and you have no idea why, check to see if Zemanta has added such a link to your site.

Also, here is what to do if your account is suspended.

First, when you try to log in to your account, your password will be rejected. You can, however, request that the password be changed by clicking the “I forgot my password” link. You’ll get a new one. However, if you do not have any blogs that are still active, you’ll have nothing to log into.

Second, contact support. The url is http://en.support.wordpress.com/contact/. For a suspended blog you will need to fill out the form without logging in. This is because you can type in the blog url if you are not logged on; but must select a blog from a drop-down menu if you are logged on. Suspended blogs do not show up in the drop down menu.

Explain the situation (that your blog is suspended) and ask why. Be brief and polite.

Third, wait for a reply. In my case, I had to remove the offending link. I was able to get into my blog dashboard and went to the posts. There I entered in the offending url in the search field. I found it, deleted it and the blog was back up shortly.