Forgive me, if I should somehow step over the line in this post, but I am extremely frustrated about and, frankly, mad at Worldpress' policy concerning username changes/blog deletion/url reuse.
Here is what happened: I created a blog at heartofeurope.worldpress.com. Then, because I overlooked the "Display name publicly as:"-option which can modify the name under which posts appear in the blog, I deleted the blog again because I wanted to create it anew with a different username.
(BTW, changing the username is no problem in Blogger, but that is not really my main point here)
Well, you all know what happened then - there are a couple of other posts here in the forums from people who ended up with the same problem: the address heartofeurope.worldpress.com is GONE.
Not gone as in everything-that-has-been-written-on-this-blog-gone but this-URL-is-forever-unusable-GONE.
First of all I would really love to know why I, who created this blog-"domain" should not be able to reuse it.
In case somebody answers to this question in the way that I expect - "That's the policy and you should have read the FAQ / the verification email!" - then I can only say:
Bulls***!! I am sorry, but the reason why I am so freaking mad is that contrary to what the FAQ states in this matter there is no unambiguous indication of what a blog deletion entails throughout the whole process!!
Here is what the FAQ says re "I deleted my blog but now I’d like it back":
"You cannot. When you delete a blog there are clear warnings about the consequences of doing so. It cannot be brought back."
That is simply not true. The "Delete Blog" option gives the following warning and confirmation request:
"Remember, once deleted your blog cannot be restored.
I'm sure I want to permanently disable my blog, and I am aware I can never get it back."
Now maybe I am exceedingly stupid or it is because English is not my first language, but that does not in any way indicate to me that this Blog-URL will not be reusable.
"cannot be restored" and "can never get it back" is perfectly fine if the warning should convey that all the content will be gone. But the phrasing is lacking - no, it is extremely negligent and ambiguous if it is intended to indicate that the URL "heartofeurope.wordpress.com" will be unusable from then on.
Similarily, the warning in the verification email for the deletion process is just as bad:
"If you delete your blog, please consider opening a new WordPress.com blog some time in the future! (But remember your current blog and username is gone forever.)"
This message is doubly confusing because it is not only ambiguous but also plain false! Here we have again the "blog is gone forever" for which the same argument as above holds. But "username is gone forever"??
I still have the same username - it's just that I had to creat a new blog, because, as I have probably made abundantly clear, I CANNOT reuse the old name...
Sorry for the long post but for all those with enough patience to make it this far: I would really love to hear some advice on this.
I will probably also write a complaint to support, but I thought it would be better to have some feedback on this from the forum first.
drmike
