Deleting A Blog - More Complicated Than You Think

To my readers who also have blogs:

If you ever decide to delete your blog, please research the process carefully and act with deliberate caution. The blogger delete button doesn't actually delete the blog like you think it does. Unfortunately, I'm speaking from the Lesson-Learned-The-Hard-Way camp.

Until August I had a blog for the women's ministries of my old church. I used it to communicate with the women who were in the Bible study I was leading. In August, when we finished the study, I went to my Blogger dashboard and hit the Delete This Blog button. The option to do anything with that blog disappeared from my dashboard and I assumed it was gone. I typed in the URL a couple of times since then, just to make sure, and sure enough an error 404 would show up indicating the blog was no longer in use.

Until today. Apparently a bot picked up my blog before I deleted it, and kept the last page in it's cache. Once I deleted it from my dashboard, some (insert whatever mean names you want here) person took the cached site and replaced it with some pretty disgusting and awful stuff. They put my banner back up and are using my post titles, along with 'posted by Julie' - but it's just revolting.

The church discovered the mess through a link on their women's ministry page that hadn't been taken down. They notified me, but guess what?! I can't do anything about it because I no longer have access on my dashboard. Nice, huh? I've contacted Blogger help and will be waiting for their assistance on this.

So I've become a little obsessed with researching this all evening and here's what I found out. If you're done blogging and you want to delete it - Don't. Instead go in and delete all your posts. Leave one post that says something like 'This blog is on vacation' or whatever you want. Then just leave it alone. That way, the blog is still yours and they can't do what they did to mine. At least that's how I understand what I read.

The site that I found most helpful was www.bloggerstatusforreal.blogspot.com. But it was THIS post where I began to understand what had happened, and what I maybe should have done. If I'd known better. (sigh) But really....I never would've guessed or imagined this scenario!