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| Issue # 4 below: Regarding the Preview/Save Drop-Down Menu |
Kindly look into the following: which seems to concern your "fact-checkers" not following your guidelines — your most basic guidelines — and that at your clients' expense.
I wish to address this in addition to last year's ban of a couple of No Pasarán posts and two other issues (for a total of four points on Blogspot bugs and vexations altogether).
1) An Allegedly Controversial Post Was Not Reset to "Draft" Status, But Unceremoniously Disposed of, Vanishing Completely
It is now almost 20 years since I, and at times my fellow bloggers, have been faithful to Blogger and used your services for No Pasarán.
The other day (November 10th?), I was shocked to see that a post of mine had been taken down, with the following explanation.
We have received a DMCA complaint for one or more of your blogs. Emails with the details were sent to you and all affected posts have been reset to "Draft" status (you may find them by selecting "Drafts" on the "Edit posts" page for each of the affected blogs). You may re-publish the posts with the offending content and/or link(s) removed. If you believe you have the rights to post this content, you can file a counter-claim with us. For more on our DMCA policy, please click here. Thank you for your prompt attention.This post was unpublished because it violates Blogger Community Guidelines. To republish, please update the content to adhere to guidelines.
With 13,600 posts over, to repeat, almost 20 years, we have been banned I think no more than five times (certainly less than 10 times) — in addition to guest writers asking that their guest posts be taken down out of fear of their being cancelled by society at large. But that is none of our responsibility; that is the doings, direct or indirect, of a society failing in free speech and vigorous debate (sometimes known as: the First Amendment) which this blog (hardly wrongly) wishes to describe (and, frankly, to denounce).
As we are responsible writers and journalists, and feel we behave responsibly, we have not felt any guilt, and we have counter-claimed, or are going to counter-claim (see point nr 2 below), all of the bans, previous and present.
But the problem with the November 2023 post is that it was not "unpublished". And the post was not "reset to Draft status". It was entirely removed and has totally vanished.
Unless we are mistaken, moreover, we never received an email in our gmail inbox informing us of a ban or even of a problem, as is Google's custom.
Not only was, and is, filing a counter-claim impossible, as was/is updating the content to your "standards", there was a real risk of our not being able to find any part of the original text, thus losing it partially or completely. (Thanks for the Instalink, Ed Driscoll.)
The only reason that I was lucky enough to find the post (now duly edited) was that I happened to have a window open with my blog un-freshened since before the take-down. (Good thing I had not refreshed it!) I could therefore "choose" the entire content of the post from the open public blog, press Copy, and paste said content into a freshly-opened and brand-new Blogger post (set not to HTML view, naturally; but to Compose view).
I now have the post up again, minus what I suppose was the offending segment (I suppose it had to do with references to the woman's contact information)
But of course, the new post's hyperlink is entirely different, whereas any hyperlinks linking to the old/first post (even if I had made a totally new title with totally different words) from elsewhere on the internet are now dead. Dead and broken.
The first post, Western Integration I: Sexy Westernized Middle Eastern Girl in France Mocks the Murder of an Israeli Baby in an Oven (VIDEO) ( https://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/2023/11/western-integration-i-young-westernized.html ), now brings us to an error statement: "Sorry, the page you were looking for in this blog does not exist."
The second post, Western Integration I: Sexy Westernized Middle Eastern Girl in France Mocks the Gruesome Oven Murder of an Israeli Baby (VIDEO) ( https://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/2023/11/western-integration-i-sexy-westernized.html ), is up as of this writing.We hope and expect, Google Blogger, you to look into this matter and deal with whoever made this mistake (?), using this as an opportunity to press the message to all your (cough) "fact-checkers" that they follow the guidelines, so that it doesn't happen again, whether to me or to anyone else using your services.
(If there are any of your fact-checkers who operate more from ideology than from pure fact-finding, maybe it is time for them to move to a different department…)
Speaking of which…
2) It Is Time to Un-Ban No Pasarán's Posts on the Nazis' Hostile Attitude Towards the Christian Religion
These two posts raising questions about Christianity in recent and ancient History were banned last year in spite of the fact that nobody complained about them for respectively 10 and 7 years (!).
• Adolf Hitler in Religious Surroundings: Is There Really Evidence That the Führer Was a Christian? (December 2012)
• By laying the crusades at the feet of Christianity, Obama was unwittingly laying ISIL's atrocities at Islam's feet (December 2015)Will your fact-checkers please wake up to the fact that (no matter what Stalin claimed) there is no controversy — none whatsoever — regarding the fact that Adolf Hitler was not representative of the bourgeoisie and that the founder of the Nazi party was opposed, as much as Vladimir Lenin and Che Guevara, to all religions (Christian as well as well as Jewish), and that he never ceased identifying as a socialist.
Therefore, it is high time for you to restore the two remaining banned posts on the subject of Christianity, both of which, again: are at least seven years old (!), meaning that for 10 years and seven years respectively, these allegedly hateful (?!) and guideline-violating (?!) posts bothered not a single soul; and both of which: are based on reports in, among others, the New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, Life Magazine, and The Daily Mail, along with Denmark's foremost historical publication. Google and Blogger: do you want to ban those periodicals as well?
For 10 years, or 7, nobody has had reason to complain about those posts for the simple reason that — like everything else we (try to) do at No Pasaràn since the blog was founded, 19 years ago — it is (or certainly tries to be) entirely fact-filled, it is entirely dispassionate, and there ought to be nothing controversial about its conclusions.
Sources include:
A) Kirchenkampf: Hitler Was Determined to Diminish the Number of Catholic Schools (The International Herald Tribune)
B) How Hitler's Nazi propaganda machine tried to take Christ out of Christmas (The Daily Mail)
C) "Out With Jesus": During His 12 Years in Power, Hitler Tried to Ban the Tradition of Christmas (Denmark's Historie monthly)
D) Just for the record, Hitler detested Christianity (Jonah Goldberg)
E) Worshipping Little Else But the Aryan Race, Hitler Abhorred the Christian Faith and Wanted to Replace Christmas with the Pagans' Yuletide (Life Magazine)
F) "Hitler remained to the end a socialist"; he "was totally irreligious and" wanted to hang the Pope in St Peter's Square (Paul Johnson, Modern Times: A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1990s)
As for Barack Obama, the 44th occupant of the Oval Office may be a living saint — we do not dispute that (at all) — but it should still be permissible to raise questions about the Crusades (insofar, naturally, as there is supporting evidence) without alleged "Islamophobia" entering the picture.
Again (and as I wrote to you on September 18, 2022), here are No Pasarán's two posts that need to be un-banned and republished:
• Adolf Hitler in Religious Surroundings: Is There Really Evidence That the Führer Was a Christian? (December 2012)
• By laying the crusades at the feet of Christianity, Obama was unwittingly laying ISIL's atrocities at Islam's feet (December 2015)
Update (December 4): both posts have been restored — thank you, Blogger
3) Major (Double) Bug: Loss of a Post's Entire Contents by One Innocuous Move
It is exasperating that one can suffer the loss of a post's entire contents that one has worked on for days, or even weeks or more, simply by innocently using the Ctrl+Z command.
3.1) Two or three times, now, this has happened where I re-open a saved post to add some finishing touches, I make some tiny mistake, and without thinking, I press Ctrl Z once or twice to undo just a simple typo, and before you can say the word "blogspot", the entire contents have vanished completely, with the text field becoming entirely blank.
3.2) Even if, in my horror, I refrain from Saving — the obvious solution — but simply close the tab (or press the Go Back button) to go to the main All Posts page, the contents are not recovered when I reopen the post! The content is still blank and empty, although the title is still there, the only part to survive. The last time this happened was in 2020 or 2021, but that does not necessarily mean that the bug has been fixed (deliberately or otherwise), because I have been extra careful (or extra paranoid!) since then. Is there nothing to do, and can Google/Blogger please fix this (double) bug as quickly as possible?!
4) Regarding the Preview/Save Drop-Down Menu
It concerns the drop-down menu in the top right corner which gives you, prior to Publishing, the option to either Save or to Preview post.
However, the two are not equal: the option which stands out is the Preview button, in that it is the option which needs no drop-down manipulations but can be accessed (clicked) directly. Preview, in other words, is currently the default button.
In view of the fact that I rarely use Preview whereas I am constantly pressing the Save button (see item 3 above) — and that I assume that the vast majority of blogger users certainly use the Save button more often than the Preview one — I wish that you would invert the two commands, making Save the easiest to access, i.e., making Save the default button.
