One of the blogs I follow, called Jatulintarha by Jenny Kangasvuo was deleted by Blogsome a few days ago without any warning. She reported the problem via the Blogsome forum, and the answer she got was not very reassuring:

The blog was intentionally deleted by an administrator yesterday. It seems that a complaint was received about it, but I don’t have any details of the complaint.

According to Blogsome’s terms of service, they have the right to terminate the service they offer at any time, without any explanation:

Browse The World Ltd. shall also have the right without notice and at any time to terminate the blogsome.com web site or any portion thereof, or any products or services offered through the blogsome.com web site, or to terminate any individual’s right to access or use the blogsome.com web site or any portion thereof.

You agree that any termination of your access to the sevices so provided under any provision of these Terms of Service may be effected without prior notice, and acknowledge and agree that Browse The World / blogsome.com may immediately deactivate or delete your blogsome.com site/blog and all related information and files in your blogsome.com site/blog and/or bar any further access to such files or the blgosome service. Further, you agree that Browse The World shall not be liable to you or any third-party for any termination of your access to the service.

The blog was back online today when I checked it, but according to Jenny, there has been no explanation as to the nature of the complaint received or for anything else, for that matter. Sure, we all agreed to the terms of service when we first put up our blogs, but I still think that it’s going a bit far to just delete a blog after receiving one complaint and never even contacting the blog owner first. Hell, the least they could do is to tell Jenny what the complaint was about.

Of course, the reason may very well be related to the nature of the blog, here described by Jaakko Meriläinen:

The blog in question was written in Finnish by a well-known Finnish feminist researcher and sexual minority rights activist and it contained, in addition to personal reflection, texts about Finnish academia and her research on pornography and sexual minority issues, with the tag “porno” being used.

I for one am feeling quite apprehensive about continuing to use Blogsome as the host for my blogs. Annoyingly enough, it is the best free blog service I’ve come across so far, at least from a technical standpoint. So, what to do? Any suggestions for better free hosts?

Edit later:

The admins at the Blogsome forum clarified the issue, and I for one am satisfied with the result:

I apologise for the error made. Just a little bit of background - we get literally 100’s of pornographic blogs set up (and 100’s that are in flagrant breach of copyright). It is not an easy task picking out valid ones from bad ones. If this is an error it is the first, following the deletion of 1000’s of pretty awful blogs. The task is made more difficult as we don’t particularly like looking at the porno blogs in detail to investigate.

In relation to this case, it wasn’t a random deletion. The error arose from a blog post entitled:
“Give me crack and anal sex”
http://jatulintarha.blogsome.com/2007/10/03/give-me-crack-and-anal-sex/
The reviewer assumed that this was a pornographic blog in error and deleted.

I think that’s a fairly reasonable mistake to make, especially if one doesn’t speak Finnish and thus is not able to read the full entry. Now that the admin actually apologised and fixed the mistake, I think it’s not necessary for me to look for another host for my blogs. I find it reassuring to see that things can be resolved quickly and openly with Blogsome admins.