Thanks to the Blogger Team!

Some years back, I decided to change this blog's URL to one that's compatible and suitable to its title and posts. I did that and changed the site's URL from binawadh dot blogspot dot com to its present hadhramouts dot blogspot dot com; a short while later, I also changed the site's title from Moments In Words From Hadhramout to Out Of Hadhramout. Immediately after changing the blog's URL, I reclaimed the previous one so as not to allow some one else to use it. The very big mistake I made was to have reclaimed it through a Yahoo Mail account that I used to sign it to Google.

A few weeks ago, I discovered that binawadh dot blogspot dot com had been hijacked and was being used by some one else. What was so disconcerting about this, was that the hijacker was not only using my old URL, but was also using my old site's title; as if that was not enough, the hijacker was using a few of my old posts on the blog. I was dumb founded at how this could have happened.

I decided to sign in to Blogger (using the Yahoo Mail account) but couldn't. It is then I realized that who ever had my old URL had hacked in to my Yahoo Mail account, hijacked it and was using it. I contacted Yahoo Customer Service and did all I could to get back my email, but failed. I even called their Customer Service and spoke to a representative for almost twenty minutes, but still couldn't get my email back. I then decided to contact Google's Blogger Team, through the Google Groups and wrote to them about my problem. And as I expected, after some time - Google took action and solved the problem: they removed the hijacked URL.

This has been a very good lesson for me. My using a Yahoo Mail account to sign in to Google Blogger was a very big mistake; as I was struggling to get my Yahoo Mail account back, I discovered that a few months ago almost half a million Yahoo Mail accounts were compromised. I have some advice: take care when deleting a blog or changing its URL; Blogger settings allows the user to easily change the URL for a blog. Be careful doing that. There are people who seem to have nothing to do, but use the Internet in very disruptive and wasteful ways; they have no ethics whatsoever. And do not use a non Google account to sign in to Google, especially when creating a blog - it is best signing up for a Google account and using it; that way, your account is much more secure.

It is incredible how efficient Google is! If they can take care of such very small, minor issues like that of a URL being hijacked, particularly when it was done so when some one, like me, had foolishly made a very big mistake when signing up for the account using a non-Google Mail account and then getting in to problems - I can imagine how much more efficient they would be when taking care of bigger problems. I do thank Google Blogger Group and most of all - the Google Blogger Team, for taking action and for removing my old, hijacked blog's URL: THANK YOU Google Blogger Team!

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