Censored and Welcomed

Censored stamp
Featured image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
I have moved my site to HostGator due to the problems described below. Please excuse the mess on this new site.

Someone is trying to get me removed from WordPress.com!

@druesome Please remove the blog linked to the xiaoyingtai username. It's a BDSM mature content blog and I got sucked into telling him how to link to it in another thread when I was to busy to go back in time and see why it had been removed. @xiaoyingtai I would appreciate it if you would remove like button clicks from my blogs. I don't promote blogs of your kind and I don't want your like button clicks appearing on my blogs.
Image: Screencap from WordPress.com forums

Shall I lie and say that I am all agog to find out if they succeed in getting me censored? To be honest, it seems very unlikely. There are so many BDSM blogs on WordPress.com, and I reported my own blog as mature content on the second day of its existence.

Here is my response to the complaint:

I’m not a him, I’m a her.

I’ve removed two likes and two links. They were short-lived and I don’t think there aren’t any more, but let me know if you find any.

And there has clearly been some misunderstanding, because my blog has never been removed, so you have never told me how to reinstate it. You did tell me how to report my own blog as mature content. That was the very first question I asked in this forum before I had been on WordPress for a week.

As such, I am very sorry to have upset you, but I think it is clear why I thought you knew. My tagline has always included the word BDSM. There are a lot of us on WordPress.com.

I have been adding a warning to my Blogging 201 posts, and in future I will add it to support requests too. I hope WordPress will make it possible for me to flag my icon or something so that future misunderstandings like this will not occur.

Although that is much less urgent than creating an Enter/Exit screen before entering the blog itself, which Blogger and LiveJournal already have.

And all of this came out of an innocent bug report. You can view the conversation here. [Edit: One reason she is alarmed is that she previously told me how to do something that mature content bloggers apparently are not allowed to do.]

In a completely separate thread, my Blogging 201 classmates have been incredibly supportive. This is just a sample:

aimingtobegreen: Would anyone be interested in joining a FB page for the April 2014 class? [snip]

Me: [snip] But would you want a BDSM blogger to be part of this?

KleesButterfly: [snip] And #xiao yingtai : everybody who participated in this class should be welcome!

aimingtobegreen: I agree, anyone should be welcome.

Look, it’s a welcome mat!

Welcome mat with cartoon cats holding up both front paws in greeting
Image by Claudio Matsuoka (CC BY 2.0)

I told them about the removal request, and aimingtobegreen said, “I think as long as you warn people clearly there will be adult content then there shouldn’t be a problem.” Sigh. I wish that were true, but the complainer knew that part from Day One. I guess I need to say it’s BDSM and hope that the tiny vanilla kids who might be freaked out won’t be curious enough to Google it.

Somehow that doesn’t sound like the ideal solution, does it.

Anyone else have stories of censorship or welcome to share?

Edit: My Twitter friends are giving me amazing solutions! And to put the icing on the cake, I just got permission to use this amazing image from an awesome photographer I emailed out of the blue, Marty Sohl. It’s time for me to mention that nearly all the Flickr photographers I approach are equally generous: the posts on CollarMe, subverted tropes and bottoms are all illustrated by special permission. Thank you, everyone. I’m hugging all of you with my brain as I scurry around backing up my blog.
 

2 thoughts on “Censored and Welcomed”

  1. Sad case that people “hate” others due to thier lifestyle. It goes every where no matter what lifestyle anyone choses, some one always hates it. We just have to hold our heads up and progress forward.

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