Long long ago, when I was in college and had a lot of free time on hand, I used to blog on a platform/community called Blogster under the pseudonym of meanderthalis. In spite of all technical and functional shortcomings of platform, it was a good social experience, thanks to many of the bloggers there who befriended me and many of my friends who joined me there. We had lively discussions on almost everything under the sun, and it was good to interact with thinkers around the world. 

Later, when I started working (and so did most of my friends), I stopped posting on that site. However, the old posts still remained and attracted an occasional visitor. Last week, when I checked to see how my old blog was doing, I was shocked to find that it had been “banned” and my user account disabled. I understand that it’s their right to disable or block my account or blog if they want to, because it’s their site. But shouldn’t they at least send me a mail giving me the reason behind this extreme step, and give me a chance to backup my content (because as per the terms I still own the content)? Close to 100 posts that I had written over more than 3 years, all lost at the click of a button! I mailed them a couple of times asking to know what happened, and requesting to be given a dump of my posts, but have not managed to get as much as an automated response from them. 

Not wanting to lose my data, and not having any hope of getting help from Blogster team, my only option was to salvage as much of the data as possible from Google’s cache and the WayBackMachine. I haven’t been able to get the full information from these sources, but better something than nothing at all. I saved the data from most of the posts of significance, and got this screenshot of one of the cached pages, at least to give me a nostalgic feel of those good old days. 

So, just wanted to let my readers know that this is how Blogster treats one of their early contributors who drove up their web traffic by almost 29000 views (refer the screenshot above), and actively participated in their community in its initial days (the screenshot again shows that I had 68 friends on Blogster). If you have an account on blogster and it’s still not disabled or banned, try to download and save your blog locally when you can, because you never know when they decide to blow it away.

P.S: I request you to pass on this message, so that other unsuspecting “blogsters” may be warned!