Wednesday, February 22, 2012

The Blog Farm

About a month ago I contacted John Gilbert, the admin for The Blog Farm, asking him when my paid syndication was ending. He sent me back an apology, explaining that his server had been hacked, and that my blog had not been up for months, and that the time I had lost would be tacked onto the end of my subscription.

Of course I was surprised by this, but I simply let it go. The Blog Farm really does not mean very much to me, and he never did tell me how much time I had lost, but I am a trusting soul, and figured he would do the right thing and tack on the correct amount of time.

He asked me to go back up to his site and reregister my blog, which I did on Super Bowl Sunday. The next morning he wrote me and asked me to reregister my blog again because his staff had been watching the Super Bowl, and my blog never made it up. I told him that I did not want to reregister my blog, and that he should fix the problem from his end. He wrote me back, telling me that I was lucky he was in a good mood because he was thinking of banning me from The Blog Farm permanently because of the tone of my email.

Okay. I can take a shot on the chin and roll with the punch. I am trained in that. But I was pretty irritated because I paid this jackass for a year of service, my blog got dropped for who knows how many months, and this guy was giving me attitude because I told him to fix a problem that he created. He really does think he is ALL that.

John Gilbert censors most of my posts. When I write fuck, he replaces it with f**ck. The same goes for shit and any other expletive that I choose to use. This does not sit well with me at all. I don’t believe in censorship, and beyond changing words, he also changed out pictures I used with my blog because he found them to be offensive.

This morning he sent me an email claiming that people had complained about some of my posts in the form of comments, and that I had named people in personal attacks, and that he had taken the posts down. He did not, however, say which ones they were. I believe it was a single post called Set Your Shit Straight, which was posted January 30, 2012.

At first I just brushed it off and told him that I would be more careful in the future. I did explain, however, that this was not a personal attack, but merely a statement of facts, and that I truly had been robbed of thousands of dollars without recourse, and that people need to be held accountable for their actions.

Then I thought about the situation, and I realized that it was completely unacceptable, and I would not agree to being censored any longer. I asked him to please remove my blog from his site, and that I would donate the rest of the money I had paid to his cause, because he does offer a valuable service for children, but I am not PG 13, and that my audience has come to respect me for my honesty, truth and willingness to lay my heart and soul on the line.

You can’t have it both ways, John. This is who I am. Have a great day, a pleasant tomorrow, and a good night you ignorant slut.

Love to all!

James M. Weil

2 comments:

  1. Dear Mr. Weil,

    I have read your article about The Blog Farm with a great deal of interest because I too have a subscription over there.

    My relationship with The Blog Farm and with the administrator have always been somewhat different than you describe.

    I have always found Mr. Gilbert to be very helpful, friendly and outgoing. He has helped me with a lot of little technical problems concerning computers and seems to have bent over backwards to assist me with writing and posting and so on and so forth and I have, generally, had a very positive experience over there.

    Lately, however, I seem to have attracted the attentions of another blogger who seems to attach to every post that appears on the Blog Farm and who consistently and seemingly without fail raves and rants at me and is often very personally insulting and accusatory. I have started thinking of this Blogger as a Troll because his continued barrage of negativity toward me very much resembles the actions of one as described in several articles I have read about them.

    I think that in some circumstances, an administrator on a forum might be inclined to inform such a person as the one who haunts my writings with such personally insulting nastiness that this kind of activity is a no no and cannot be tolerated or something of that nature.
    Some admins might even go so far as to block the IP of such a pest off their site.

    I mean to say that some of the stuff this individual who has his own blog says about me might, under some circumstances, be considered as slanderous at best. He infers that I am uninformed, stupid, out of touch, off base, and has on a couple of occasions called me such names as "Comrade" and "Adolph" in such a manner as to insinuate that my writings may be communistic or even nazi-like.

    I have appealed for some help with this and have been told that the individual is doing nothing but expressing a personal opinion and that I should grow a thicker skin if I am going to write controversial stuff such as the political blogs that I do write.

    I am paying good subscription money each month for the privilege of having this total a-wad insult me and I am getting close to the point where I will not feel inclined to do this for much longer.

    Lately I have had some success in getting some of my posts published over there with the comments closed so the troll cannot get into them and that helps some but not all of them are being so marked even though I make sure to indicate "Comments Closed" at the end of each post I make.

    I think that wherever we go on the Internet, there can be a certain amount of problems depending where we choose to put our materials.

    I am sorry that you have had your experience and now I have shared one of mine.

    I do have to say that I have been treated very courteously and kindly at The Blog Farm though and I get a kick out of seeing my stuff appear on their Feature Page each day.

    Maybe my current difficulty will out and maybe not.

    But I just wanted to share.

    By the way, this is a really nice-looking blog you have here and I like especially the article about the e-cigarettes because I tried one awhile back.

    I finally conquered smoking through the use of the patch and the help of a nurse at The VA Medical Center.
    I have been smoke free for three years now.

    But your blog is interesting, informative and very helpful and I had to tell you that.

    Best Regards always,

    John

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