Druid Digest Service Outage

A belated Merry Christmas to everyone and a slightly premature Happy New Year!

You may have noticed over the last several weeks that Druid Digest was offline. Unfortunately, the website was accidentally flagged by one of Blogger's blog crawling robots as spam and immediately yanked from the web. Apparently, this is a rather common occurrence. At the moment, it appears as if that problem has been resolved and, hopefully, we will not encounter any similar snags moving forward.

I wanted to provide this information both to explain the website's temporary absence and to provide advice and information to other Blogger users who find themselves similarly situated.

The process for getting a robot tagged website back online is only slightly cumbersome. First, if the Blog is still on your dashboard, follow the Restore link. Second, follow the steps on the Blogger Help Forum as outlined in my help request. The sooner you complete those steps, the sooner your Blog will be reviewed and back online, so doing all of them at once is highly recommended.

As for how long these little snafus will put your Blog out of commission, it is hard for me to say. Druid Digest had the unfortunate distinction of ticking off the robots right before Christmas, so the two weeks it was down might be slightly exaggerated. Blogger says it will process review requests within two business days, but that does not appear to be the case 100% of the time.

The best piece of advice I can give you if you find yourself in this position is stay calm. For at least twenty days, your Blog still exists even if you or anyone else is unable to access it. It is not gone forever. Follow the protocol, make polite, informative posts in the Help Forum and wait it out. You will be back online before you know it.