Mini-Update On What Just Happened (aka Why The Blog Was Down)

Hello all! If you were looking at my blog over the past day (Friday 21st July at the time of writing this), you probably noticed something rather unusual had occurred and I wanted to provide a bit of a mini-update to explain what just happened.

Suspension

So after finishing work and taking photos of my latest arrival from the post (88 Film’s Magic Cop and The Untold Story), I went to check my PC as per usual and got a message over on Discord alerting me that something happened on my blog. And as I checked the site in closer detail – it was down. In fact more than that, it was unavailable because it was suspended.

Now this was obviously giving me alarm bells as it came out of nowhere and I had no warning whatsoever. The suspension notice they claimed was due to violation of terms and services which was confusing, because again I had no notifications or warnings for any of my posts. I even did some research and the WordPress staff are supposed to contact you if something looks like it needs to be removed or altered.

Worst of all, whilst I was able to view the dashboard I was not able to view any of my posts or assets. This basically means I could not backup any of my work that I’ve put into this blog, that includes the write-ups and photos. They state that you can export your work for use elsewhere but due to the large amount of assets on my blog this option was not working and that’s apparently a common issue for a lot of people with bigger content.

While the good news is that I never delete the photos that I take because what’s on this blog is actually a smaller sized version of the original photos due to the limited storage space that is in place, the write-ups were not backed up. And even though I would prioritise the photos over the written work, at the end of the day the writeups are just as important so it was just heart-breaking to see over five years worth of blog work just disappear in the blink of an eye.

The worst thing about this whole ordeal is that situations like this are not only nerve-wrecking as you don’t know what to do, but it also affects your mental health and wellbeing especially as it can ruin your day. For context I was supposed to be making progress on a video game that I wanted to complete throughout the evening, but instead I couldn’t stop worrying about this blog. Not to mention that it’s even worse when its happening on a Friday when support is likely not to take any notice until the weekend is over.

Regardless of the situation I had to act as there wasn’t much time left to resolve the situation, especially given the dashboard notice stated you should respond sooner if you think this is in error. Given there was only one option available I responded to the notice to see if I can get this resolved. I did it in two different ways in case one of them had failed due to not getting any emails coming through.

As the event was rolling by I did tell my Twitter followers as well as those on Anime UK News forums that my blog had been suspended and I did see some folks respond back with their condolences and hope for this to be resolved, so I cannot thank you lot enough for the support at this point (and I’ll get back to that in a second).

The Good News & Reflection

A few hours had passed and I received an email from WordPress. It was brief, but they told me that the reason the suspension notice came to be was because my blog was caught up in their automated anti-spam system, and when they had reviewed my website they removed the suspension notice and brought it back online. All I had to do was refresh the page and it took a few minutes for it to sink in and realise that the blog is now back like nothing had happened.

And there you have it, an automated system almost destroyed my one big hobby that I’ve been doing for a decade straight. Granted half of my work is over on Blogger but the goal was to have almost everything together in one place, and to lose this blog would make everything feel worthless.

So if there’s one thing that I had learned from this situation, is that you should backup your written work even if its a minor thing, because you never know what will happen next at the end of the day. I was fortunate to have my photos backed up already but those write-ups do take a lot of time to sort out – a most recent example was my unboxing post for Arrow Video’s Bruce Lee at Golden Harvest, because it ended up being my longest and largest write-up post to date because of how packed those discs were. And I’m very proud of how well it turned out.

But repeating what I had referenced earlier – I wanted to express my thanks to everyone who enjoyed the work I’ve done for my blog. It does mean a lot to me that it has made an impact on some of you, whether its deciding on picking up a release or being inspired to create a blog similar to mine. I always said to myself that my blog doesn’t have any effect on sales but saying that I am well aware that some have openly expressed their thanks for me covering a specific title or even complimenting the photos due to how detailed they are.

Saying that though, the goal of all of this was that I just wanted to show off any anime, film or game for fun and help anyone who wanted more information for those titles as much as I could. And I do find it miraculous that Google of all places actively has my unboxing posts show up on their search engine and images section which is impressive considering I did not anticipate WordPress being able to do that unless it was a super popular site.

The hours of work that I do for this blog is all done for free in my own spare time (and I don’t get any ad revenue out of it). I kept making unboxing posts etc because it ended up being a fun routine after watching YouTube videos from BlaizeV, SlightlyOtaku and Bradleyman13 back in 2012-2013. I’ve been doing this for 10 years now. I started using Blogger in April 2013 (2 months before I turned 18), then moved over to WordPress in October 2018 to give the posts better polish, and I want to keep this going for as long as possible.

So overall, I apologise for the sudden shock for the day and hopefully it does not happen again. Until then, enjoy what this blog has to offer and look forward to my next unboxing posts and collection hauls in the coming days!