Apologies To All The Blogs I Thought I Was Following

Once upon a time in the not so distant past, I “spring cleaned” my reader.  I removed a handful of blogs that were no longer active (an error page pops up when you visit them saying the blog hasn’t been updated for some time), those which links also led to an error message (saying something about a transfer or the blog no longer being there) and lastly, those which did not resonate with me (when I started out I went crazy-indiscriminate with the follows).

I did the spring cleaning because I really want to build a community and I want to engage with (become friends with) like-minded bloggers and those whose writing I just really like.

Lately though I’ve noticed that only a few followed blogs make it to my reader. So I started hunting down the recent ones I followed and was confused to find out that I still wasn’t following them. Very strange 🤔🤔🤔 There’s one blog that I keep re-following until I finally realized I wasn’t hormonal, something was amiss!

So I finally try to raise the matter with the “experts”, one responded that he was going to escalate the problem to the more expert, Expert, who has in turn not responded yet until now.

So I try to see if maybe there are others who have experienced the same problem and, indeed there have been.

It turns out that you can be “banned” from following blogs if or when you are too spirited with your spring cleaning. Apparently there’s a certain threshold number of blogs that you can un-follow at one single time and if you exceed this limit, this triggers something in the system which gets you banned. Such spirited spring cleaning behavior is attributed to bots and others of such shady behavior.

So as of this writing, I am still waiting to be un-banned. Apparently only Prof. Dumbledore can undo the hex.

😭😭😭

Has anyone of you experienced this too? How long did it take to resolve, if ever?