So, yesterday, Cassie over at Cassie Being Cassie posted about how she no longer showed up in the tag/publishing of wordpress because her blog go listed as “Mature.” She found this out because her stats had been dropping rapidly and went looking for the cause. Curious over my own dropping stats, I’ve tried to discover if this has happened to me as well, since I apparently no longer show up published in the tags as well.

Still waiting on an answer to my quest. Apparently, only a site admin can tell you, and finding them is like finding the Lock Ness monster. In Canada. Even Cassie apparently hasn’t found one.

Here’s the thing though. With the Mature setting, it only takes one complaint about a post being mature to get the entire blog locked out. No reviews, apparently. Certainly no notice. And apparently anyone can complain.

Now, apparently what can make this happen is the mention of Sex. At all. Well, except maybe a negative, but I need to look into that more. Cassie apparently posted a couple times on that topic. I myself had done so a bit, once when I was ranting about the talking heads bashing all of BDSM as “Evil and abusive!” and one time I think in my Asatru! World’s Greatest Religion! series.

There is, of course, something very important to note here. Cassie put out the story on her blog in a post about “WordPress censoring.” I, of course, think that while WordPress needs to look over its policies of locking out blogs for one “mature” post, there is a larger issue here. WordPress only locks people out. I think the issue is the ease with which someone can apparently go around locking out blogs from the public that they don’t like, simply by complaining that they are “mature.” I’d actually be interested to know if any other Pagan/Heathen/Satanist blogs have had this problem. Because if it happened to Cassie, and probably happened to me, I’m pretty sure it’s happened to others. This seems an incredibly easy was for someone with their panties in a bunch over polytheistic religions (most, if not all of which, happen to be sex positive) to go around and shut down those blogs from reaching people. Be it a Christian or Muslim who believes that only the “True Path” should be heard from to an Atheist out to hide all religions, it’s way to easy to get people shut up.

If someone from the Admins would like to take a look at this, and maybe see about restoring those blogs who have been shut out, or adapting the “mature” filter to only lock out those post which have “mature” content while letting the rest of the blog alone to be published, I think that would be a good thing to do.