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Contacting the owner of an empty blog

  1. sylphandante
    Member

    Cheerio!

    I'm interested in obtaining a WordPress.com blog URL that is already reserved by someone else. Since the blog itself has no content, there is no way to comment anything and thus reach the blog owner. Googling for the blog URL doesn't produce any usable results, and I don't know the owner's e-mail address. I can't report it as inactive, and that's beside the point anyway. I know it isn't in the WordPress.com staff's responsibility to poke people for not being active, but if I can't contact the blog owner myself and the blog will remain empty, it's a dead end. So, with all this being said, is there any way of contacting the empty blog owner without knowing his/her e-mail address? (The URL I'm referring to here is http://juho.wordpress.com/.)

    Many thanks in advance!

  2. timethief
    Member

    Just to be clear on this subject there's absolutely no way that wordpress.com Staff are going to violate the privacy of a user.

  3. sylphandante
    Member

    timethief, I know, but I guess it would theoretically be possible to implement a way of contacting the owner via the WordPress.com interface, without revealing the owner's e-mail address to the sender, much the same way comments are currently being handled.

    "...please consider contacting the blogger directly if you take issue with their blog. - - - Some blogs list their contact info, or you can always just leave a comment on any blog post and it will get sent to the blog owner."
    (From: http://en.wordpress.com/complaints/)
    I would love to leave comments, but there isn't anything to comment on.

    "It is possible that, in future, we will consider reclaiming blog names that have been stockpiled by spammers and squatters and never used (although we make absolutely no promises that this will happen)."
    (From: http://en.support.wordpress.com/recycling-blog-names/)
    I can see why they have decided to do that, but wouldn't it help if one had a way of contacting the blog owners, so that WordPress.com wouldn't have to worry about this so much?

  4. sylphandante
    Member

    Found some topics that discuss more or less the same thing.

    "Inactive blogs are never deleted and can only be transferred from blog owner to blog owner. If you cannot contact the blog owner somehow, e.g. by leaving a comment on the blog, there is little staff can do. Blogs are active forever, even if they are not used."
    (From: http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/an-inactive-blog-can-be-erased)

    "Re unused domains (i.e. those that have never had any content, particularly those collected by name squatters): we've discussed ways of recycling them. There are a few problems. It might happen eventually - certainly we won't rule it out - but it's not a high priority right now and there's no work in progress on implementing it. "
    (From: http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/expiration-data-for-unused-domains)

    I would still like to see a moderator clarifying the current, up-to-date situation on this.

  5. timethief
    Member

    We volunteers answering forum questions have heard numerous similar arguments for years. The outcome is always the same. It's stated in the excerpt you have posted above. Here is the link you can use to contact Staff directly http://en.support.wordpress.com/contact/

  6. sylphandante
    Member

    "Try leaving a comment on the blog to see if they will respond to you and perhaps agree to let you have it. If that does not work, you can try contacting staff to see if they will forward a message to the blog owner for you."
    (From: http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/blog-name-taken-not-used)

    Yeah, it seems like it's the only way to go for now. I guess I'm going to just cross my fingers and hope to get it solved this way. Thanks for helping me out! :)

  7. timethief
    Member

    You know I wouldn't be concerned about a subdomain name. I would be purchasing a domain name for my wordpress.com blog, and then it wouldn't matter that the other wordpress.com blog name isn't available.

  8. raincoaster
    Member

    The situation has been clarified as recently as last month. There is no change.

    I agree with TT. I don't like paid upgrades normally, but if you MUST have things exactly your way, it's not unreasonable to pay $15 a year for that. You could then get your unique name, without the "wordpress" part of the url. There are many advantages to this, too many to go into right now, but it does solve your problem completely and takes about 15 minutes to do.

  9. timethief
    Member

    @sylphandante
    In case you choose to go with purchasing a domain name and domain mapping here's the support documentation link http://en.support.wordpress.com/domain-mapping/

  10. sylphandante
    Member

    Thanks, but if I was paying for the service, I'd be more willing to to buy my own domain and servers to run a standalone WordPress installation, since I have experience on those and it wouldn't restrict me to WordPress.com's Terms of Service either. Just because it's free doesn't mean one shouldn't demand for the best :)

  11. thesacredpath
    Member

    Contact staff. They will likely point you to the links in the support pages and tell you just what has been said in this thread.

    http://en.support.wordpress.com/contact/

  12. raincoaster
    Member

    One can always ask. One can usually expect the same response as everyone else, but you can ask.

  13. tellyworth
    Staff

    In most cases like these when staff have tried contacting the owner, there is no response.

  14. sylphandante
    Member

    I contacted the staff on this, hopefully the owner will respond.

    Would this qualify for something to be listed in the Support section? After all, as it seems this question is asked every now and then, and if the developers somewhat know the answer already, it might help to have it available.

  15. babaliciou5
    Member

    @sylphandante
    Alex is a WordPress.com staff with the username tellyworth and a Key Master label under it.

  16. sylphandante
    Member

    @babaliciou5
    Yeah, I figured that would be the case.

    Sadly, however, the staff isn't that co-operative when it comes to forwarding messages from users to users. The first e-mail reply I got from the WordPress.com team was:
    "I'm sorry to say that we are unable to give out contact details for our users, you'd need to leave a comment on the site in question to see if the owner would be willing to transfer the blog to you."

    After I had explained that I can't leave comments on the site, another staff member replied to me, saying:
    "I'm sorry, but deleted or inactive blogs cannot be restored or reused. Please check out this page to learn more about deleting your blog: http://support.wordpress.com/settings/delete-blog/"

    When I continued to explain that I just wanted to contact the owner in hopes that s/he would be willing to transfer the blog to me, the staff's reply was:
    "I'm sorry, but we're not able to transfer that blog for you."

    At this point, to be honest, I started to feel a bit frustrated by the answers they were giving me. First, they suggested leaving a comment to the blog, which just wasn't applicable. Then, they started talking about the behaviour of deleted blogs, claimed (erroneously) that inactive blogs couldn't be reused, and even told me how to delete my blog, which I think was somewhat irrelevant. After that, they told me they couldn't transfer the blog to me, but that wasn't what I was asking for, I asked them to contact the site owner for that. So I asked them to give me a clear answer:
    "By this, do you mean that WordPress.com staff can not contact blog owners?"

    To which a third staff member replied:
    "Correct, we are unable to contact users on the behalf of other users."

    Because of policies like this, I would prefer that there was a way of directly contacting the blog owners without involving the staff in the process, but there isn't, so I just can't reach the user that owns the blog - end of story.

    Bottom line: there is currently no way of contacting the owners of empty WordPress.com blogs.

  17. babaliciou5
    Member

    Uhm...you're understanding staff's responses incorrectly methinks. From my point of view, they said they have contacted the blog author but got no reply. Yet again I'm more than just happy if anyone corrects me due to my lack of english proficiency -- am an Indonesian, fyi.

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