#oneaday Day 109: Unexpected Downtime

Hello. Perhaps you noticed that for some of yesterday and most of today, this site was down for “violations of the Terms of Service”.

I had not violated the Terms of Service. What had happened was that WordPress.com’s automated anti-spam service had somehow flagged my site mistakenly, and because we’re all so fucking keen to trust stupid, proven-to-be-immensely fallible automation, it just nuked my site rather than, you know, actually attempting to contact me.

I’m glad I got the site back (not before sending about six emails to WordPress, because they didn’t even have the courtesy to send me an email notification that the site had been suspended) but I won’t lie: this whole incident has severely damaged my trust in WordPress.com. And that is a big deal; this site has been hosted on WordPress.com since 2008, and for the longest time, my site MoeGamer.net was also hosted on WordPress.com.

For many years, I have recommended WordPress in preference to all other similar platforms for its ease of use and flexibility. Sure, WordPress.com’s paid plans are vastly overpriced for what they provide, but the simplicity of what the platform offers and how you don’t have to do any complicated configuration or optimisation to get a site running efficiently has always been a big selling point in my book.

Unfortunately, of late, WordPress’ parent company Automattic has been drinking deep of the AI Kool-Aid, and stupid, pointless, obnoxious AI features are infesting every part of their operation, leading to rampant enshittification. When I first attempted to enquire about what had happened to my site, I was greeted with this response:

A screenshot of WordPress "AI Assistant" Wapuu, saying "It sounds like you want to talk to a human. Human support is only available for our paid plans. For community support, visit our forums".

What “Wapuu” did not tell me was that when you have a suspended blog, you are not allowed to post in WordPress.com’s forums, so I was seemingly completely out of luck at any attempt to communicate with an actual human being about the situation. Thankfully, I found a loophole and managed to post anyway. But I was dismayed to see this post as the top pinned post in said forums:

A screenshot from WordPress.com's support forums. It blathers on about how we should all be supportive and understanding of people using AI instead of their own actual brains.

I particularly like how they acknowledge that AI frequently talks complete shit, so you should “verify the accuracy” of anything something tells you. Support forums are supposed to be a place to go to get helpful advice, not a bot telling you to eat poisonous mushrooms or some other such shit. I am not interested in “embracing the amazing potential of AI”, I want someone from the fucking company to help me with a problem I am having which the company has caused.

It took multiple emails to WordPress.com to even get them to acknowledge there was a problem because, as I say, I was not even sent an email notification (or indeed a notification via WordPress’ own system) to tell me that the site was suspended — and, of course, that left me completely in the dark as to why it was suspended, too.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that this blog, as low-effort as it can probably seem at times, is immensely precious to me. It hosts nearly 17 years of memories and helped me survive some seriously dark times in my life, and it’s always been a valuable means of self-expression and self-therapy. To have it suddenly taken away through something that was 100% not my fault in the slightest was devastating, and it’s all but destroyed my trust in WordPress.com and Automattic as a company.

I’m presently looking into moving this blog into the self-hosted space, likely as a subdomain of moegamer.net, so watch this space for news on that if I get things sorted. In the meantime, hopefully this post won’t trigger any “AI” to take everything down again, because I’m really angry about what happened here. While you’re always at risk of something like this happening when hosting your work on servers that belong to someone else — particularly if you’re using a free service — it doesn’t feel acceptable that a 17 year old, well-established site can be completely nuked at the whim of a clearly fallible automated solution.

So yeah. That’s the situation. At least things were resolved… for now, at least. I guess we’ll have to wait and see how things go from here.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.