I've received (as has anyone running an adult blog) an email from Google - who owns Blogger.com - that states the following (Emphasis mine):
You are receiving this message because you are the admin of a blog hosted on Blogger which is identified to have Adult content.
If your adult blog currently has advertisements which are adult in nature, you should remove them as soon as possible as to avoid any potential Terms of Service violation and/or content removals. |
This may or may not apply to Degraded Damsels, I'm not sure. I have no professional advertisements on my blog and no advertisements to adult websites.
I've read through the Terms of Service, and it's not specific at all. Probably by design. So I don't know if Blogger's new policy applies to my Ebook links or not. Nor do I know if this broadly-defined policy applies to links to other adult blogs, which are of course adult websites in their own right. The email doesn't actually say the 'advertisements to adult PAYsites'. So maybe just having a links to other blogs is grounds for violation. Who knows?
To me, this sounds like another of Google's anti-porn/erotica moves, of which there have been many in the past year or so. It also feels a lot like what happened on Lycos Clubs before they were all dropped, about a decade ago, and the entire cap-pics society moved to yahoo groups and Smartgroups (which has also died off). So this might just be the first step in Google's plans to get rid of all adult-natured blogs. I just don't know.
Seems rather pointless, in any case. To misquote one Crichton's better novels, "Porn finds a way."
I haven't decided what I'll do if my blog gets deleted. I got this email only a day ago, so I only really had 4 days warning before the new policy goes into effect. As it happens, I've been thinking about starting up a private website for my Tabitha Kohls ebooks, a sort of text-only site where I could post free flash-shorts, instead of captions, and link to my books. But moving my entire blog to a website would be a fair bit of work, and possibly expensive. I'm still trying to decide what to do.
One thing I want to do, is to create a meeting place as a back up in case Degraded Damsels does get deleted. I used to be on Yahoo Groups under the name Dasii010, and I ran several blogs. One of those blogs I never actually opened to the public, and it still exists.
I'm going to set the membership to Restricted, and I'll have to personally allow people onto the group, but I'd like everyone here to go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/absurd_tales/
You'll need a yahoo account to enter, and you'll need to leave a short description of why you want to join. Just mention Degraded Damsels in your message, and I'll let you in. Hopefully I can keep the spammers out this way. Yahoo is crawling with the little buggers!
There isn't anything worth mentioning on the group yet, but if Degraded Damsels is deleted , I'll probably put up some caps there or add a link to any knew website/tumblr/blog that I start in the future. The group will function as an emergency meeting place.
Besides the group, I also have a Tumblr account, and I routinely visit many other sites and blogs, so I'll try to spread the word there as well if I start a new blog/site.
And there is always my email account too, though is DD is deleted, I doubt my gmail account will survive. But my Tabitha Kohls email should still work: tabbyfakohls@gmail.com
Anyway, I'm probably just jumping at shadows here, but who knows? Better safe, than sorry.
- B-Rex