An Oddity

I was examining my draft posts on Blogger to see if I'd left any genuinely worthy ones unfinished and noticed something peculiar: there were a lot more draft posts than I thought there should be. Looking more closely, I soon saw that a half-dozen older posts originally published many years ago had all been reverted to drafts on the same date: May 23, 2023. Take a look.

All of the posts carried a little red "hidden" icon and, when I clicked on each one, I saw a note indicating that each one had been "unpublished because it violates Blogger Community Guidelines. To republish, please update the content to adhere to guidelines." Those guidelines are available here, but, looking at them, I honestly can't fathom how any of the above posts, five of which are reviews and one of which is related to a previous review, violates them. 

It's quite baffling, especially since these are all very old posts that have existed on this blog for more than a decade. Likewise, none of them, as you can see from the pageview numbers, is an especially popular post that lots of people read and commented upon. The only common element, so far as I can tell, is that five of the six pertain to Judges Guild's Wilderlands setting, though none of them were published by Judges Guild itself. More to the point, I have plenty more Wilderlands-related posts and reviews and none of them were reverted to draft form like these were.

Has anyone else experienced this sort of thing? If so, can you explain the logic behind it? Concerns about arbitrary changes like this are precisely why I keep contemplating moving this blog to another platform. So far I haven't pulled the trigger, because doing so would be a huge headache, especially for a guy like me whose tech skills are minimal. Now I find myself wondering if I shouldn't consider it more seriously ...

UPDATE: Following the advice of others, I re-submitted all the flagged posts to Blogspot without any changes. All of them were re-activated without any explanation of why they were hidden in the first place. Looks like it probably was a case of an errant algorithm.