I've been having a problem with Facebook the last few weeks because it started deleting my comments that contained a URL to Google Maps. Facebook declared them to be a violation of Community Standards. When it first started doing that, the content of my comment was gone. And when I clicked through the various levels of explanations I learned it was considered spam because I was self-promoting. If they were URLs to my Blog, I could by it. But I get no benefits from Google Maps references. (Actually, I don't get benefits from my blogs either because I won't monetize them.) Then the notification of deletion changed to include the content of the comment. But the new notifications didn't have any explanation. I've worked around this problem by learning how to use GPS coordinates.
My Facebook problem is small compared to what Google did to me after supper on May 14, 2021. I'll start with the short story: it deleted the five posts to which I added a photo!
And now for the long story because every regular reader knows I can't say anything in 144 words or less.
I use Google's product Blogger to edit my blogs with a browser. And I use Google's product Chrome for my browser. After supper, when I clicked the edit URL of a post to which I wanted to add a photo I got a screen with a red background telling me, to paraphrase, I accessed a phishing site. (I did a bunch of editing before supper with no problems.) Now, is Blogger sending bad stuff to Chrome, or is Chrome buggy? Either way, it is a Google product that has gone bonkers. I clicked through the pages to proceed anyway because I knew the editor does not ask for personal information. What I did not notice was the red "Dangerous" text to the left of my URL because the editor seemed to be working OK. For a while. Then I started getting "Update Failed" when I clicked the update button. About that time I noticed that I could not find one of the posts that I had changed when I wanted to go back and add something more. So I saved the content of the post that was still in my browser, which was the Fairfield one. And I noticed the "Dangerous" label. I figured out how to label it as "Allow." I don't know if that fixed it or if closing the browser window and opening a new one fixed it. But I was able to be productive the rest of the evening. Then when I was done working on the blog and was reading my eMail, I noticed the notifications that more than two of my posts had disappeared.
I then proceeded to loose sleep. At about 4:00am I confirmed that the result of a Google search...
...was indeed bogus.
So I created a new post that is a small subset of the info that I had so that I could fix my links in other posts to this post. The new version of the blogger that we were forced to use in Sep 2020 is far worse than the older version. But one thing is better, the search function. Specifically, I can search the bodies of all of my posts in a blog for occurrences of the now bad link:
body:"blogspot.com/2015/12/joliet-il-ud-tower-santa-fe-and-gm-vs.html"
I found five occurrences in three posts which I changed to the new post.
Now that I've written this post, look what I found in my email!
I'm going to publish this anyhow because of all of the mental anguish that Google caused me over the last 12 hours. At least they do still have some human judgment in their content policing.
UPDATE:
But the humans didn't actually reinstate them! When I accessed the blog link in the emails such as this one...
...I still get:
I verified that all five links still don't work. I sent feedback about the reinstatement not working using the Joliet post as the example. I have to walk away from this mess for now.
(Google Search must check all of its links every night for validity because when I did the "joliet union depot tower" search around 5:00am, my post did not appear in the results. When you consider the number of URLs that must be in their database, it is impressive that they can verify them every night.)
12:38pm: I slept until afternoon. I checked a link again. Still no joy. So the pain and anguish continue.
First I have to determine which of the four remaining links did I use.
None
Google Search removal of bogus links is not as good as I indicated. Now my post is the second in the search results for Clarke Junction.
I save some images in case Google removes them because of the invalid link.
Not to worry, the same people are working on the self-driving car software.
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