banned from Facebook | Bertram's Blog

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January 14, 2026 — Pat Bertram

Daily writing prompt

In what ways do you communicate online?

When I first got on the internet during its middle years, I tried to sign up for every site I could. I wanted to get discovered as an author — or rather, I wanted to get my books discovered. I didn’t care if I got known, but along the way I made a lot of friends, especially on the defunct site of Gather (sort of a Facebook for writers), even sold some books, but I never did manage to dig myself out of obscurity.

Still, I kept on for many years. Mostly I blogged, but I also had my blog automatically posted to various sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Goodreads, and Facebook. That made it easy to keep up with people. Then about seven years ago, Facebook banned my blog, said it was spam. They wouldn’t let anyone post the link and in fact, erased all my posts from their site, every single one, all the way back to the beginning of my Facebook endeavor. I found a way around that by posting a link to this blog to another blog, then posted that link. A couple of years later, I merely shared a post by a conservative black commentator and was excoriated for being a racist. Enough was enough, so I stopped all Facebook activity. Once or twice a year I’d try to post a link, but I always got that same message about the blog being spam, so it’s been years since I actually posted anything.

Wow, except for today! Out of curiosity, I checked to see if my blog was still banned, and I was able to post a link. Does that mean I’ll go back to Facebook? I don’t know. A good friend was banned and his account was deleted with no notice and no recourse, so it’s not as if being able to post is a good reason to post, if you know what I mean.

I like that my main means of communicating online is through this blog. (Well, that and emailing, but email is via the internet, not on the internet, so I’m not sure that counts.) Being in one location keeps me from hopping all over the place looking for comments that might appear elsewhere. And anyway, Facebook no longer allows blog links to be automatically posted directly to the site — I have to go and manually post it. Not a problem in itself, but since I have a problem with Facebook itself (their allowing me to post links to this blog again in no way makes what they did to me okay) it would take a bit of adjustment. But maybe. Someday. Occasionally.

Anyway, thanks for communicating with me here! Even if you just read this, that’s communication too, which is more than anyone can expect. Hope for, perhaps, but not expect.

Enquiring minds always want to know, so no, that’s not my cat. This photo was taken when I was visiting my sister several years ago but it seemed apropos of the theme of this post.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

Posted in blogging, internet, life. Tags: banned from Facebook, blog, blogging, communicating online, dailyprompt, dailyprompt-1817, Facebook, Gather, social media. 3 Comments »

After the Peace

November 5, 2020 — Pat Bertram

For the past eight years, I’ve participated in the BlogBlast4Peace movement. Whether it helps propagate peace or not, it’s still a good project because at least for that day, a large number of people are committing acts of peace. It was a hard day for me, because unlike previous years, people could not post my blog’s link to Facebook, so I was left out of a lot of the activity. When people did try to link, they got a message that this blog did not meet FB’s community standards.

Standards? What standards? It’s become a place for advertising — every other post on my feed is an ad for some dubious product, many direct from China (though you don’t find that out until after you have ordered said product) and others that turn out to be scams that you end up paying for every month until somehow you can get the subscription cancelled. When there is a legitimate post, their fact checkers are on the ball — the biased ball — and often manage to confuse the issue more by claiming as true what is false and as false what is fact.

And yet, my blog — this very blog you are reading — doesn’t meet their standards. That I have temporarily found a way around the block by reblogging my posts on another blog and posting that link to my author page on FB, doesn’t mitigate the damage their block has done. My personal voice on the site has not been blocked — just this blog — but I am so disturbed by the events of the past few days (and people’s reactions to those events) that I’d just as soon stay away. Staying away, too, ensures that I don’t say anything that can come back at me as more and more of our freedoms are eroded. I have to remember that my main reason for developing a web presence has been to promote myself as an author, and hopefully entice people into buying my books.

Which leads me to a question — does anyone do Instagram? I know it’s popular, though I can’t imagine it being a good place for gaining book recognition, but I was wondering if it was fun. Until recently, I didn’t have a phone big enough to make using the site feasible, but now that I do have such a phone, I’m revisiting the possibility. One of many drawbacks is that it is phone intensive, and I am not a fan of doing much via phone, but the main reason I hesitate is that it is owned by FB, and I’ve had enough of FB’s shenanigans to last a life time.

At least I still have this blog. I can say what I want (unless I censor myself), can write a long or short article, can post photos and probably even videos if I so desired.

And I have my website, or at least, I do for now. I received an email today from my domain provider that since Adobe decided to discontinue their Flash support, my website builder won’t work anymore, so they are moving me to a different website builder. They told me to click a button, and everything would be transferred over. So I did, and it wasn’t. All I saw was an ugly generic photo of a hand writing with an old pen on a piece of paper. I couldn’t figure out how to do anything on the new site (especially since the email said it would automatically be done for me) so I called the company.

According to the heavily-accented fellow I talked to, the site isn’t automatically switched over — their techs will have to do the work and they will let me know when the site is ready to go live. What he said and what the email said are so different, it’s hard to know the truth (but that seems to be standard these days). Adding complication to an already complicated situation, many of the links on my website go to my blog or to another site. (When we set up the original domain, we also set up one for Jeff, and now I use that blog for extra web pages, though I don’t really need to. With all the links navigating elsewhere, I don’t need as many pages as I thought I did.) The old site won’t be deleted for another couple of months, so I have time to wait and see.

As if that weren’t enough, one of my answers on Quora was hidden because they said I plagiarized. Apparently, one can’t quote themselves without attribution.

I’m sure you’re not interested in my web woes, but I bet you’d be even less interested if I screamed to USA voters, “What the hell were you thinking?”

All that’s crashing down on me — the general mess in the real world as well as my personal mess in the web world — is making me rethink my online goals. Do I have any? Well, yes. To sell books, of course, to keep up the discipline of writing in at least a small way, and to have my own slice of online life, of which this blog is paramount. The rest — FB, Instagram, Quora, even my own website, not so much.

Luckily, the peace acts I committed yesterday are keeping me from being swept away by these issues. I’m calm about everything, in part because of what my tarot card told me today — to have courage in the face of that which cannot be changed. To that, I will have to add: to have courage (and patience) in the face of what is changing beyond all possibility of my control.

Peace to us all.

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Speaking of my books, my latest novel Bob, The Right Hand of God is now published! Click here to order the print version of Bob, The Right Hand of God. Or you can buy the Kindle version by clicking here: Kindle version of Bob, The Right Hand of God.

What if God decided to re-create the world and turn it into a galactic theme park for galactic tourists? What then?

Posted in blogging, internet, life, writing. Tags: Adobe flash support discontinued, banned from Facebook, Blog 4 peace, blog blocked on Facebook, Is Instagram worth doing, website builder obsolete. 4 Comments »

A Rainbow of Blogs

October 7, 2020 — Pat Bertram

I’ve temporarily found a way around Facebook’s total block of my blog. I share the blog to another blog I have, and then post the link to that blog. So far, so good. It’s possible FB’s algorithms will notice that the blog is not posting anything original and ban that one, too, but then I’ll do the same thing with another blog. I have plenty, most of which are moribund.

Back when I learned to blog, I discovered that I could change the color of this blog theme, so I started all sorts of blogs in order to have a whole rainbow of them. There was also one I started much later because I liked the notebook format. Then, as did all the rest, it fell by the wayside.

I did use all those blogs for a while, though I can’t remember why I started Wayword Wind — well, I needed a green blog to finish off my blog rainbow, but there must have been some other reason for the blog. With the way I purposely misspelled wayword, I must have planned on using it as some sort of writing blog, maybe even a place to post 100 word stories that I called Mini Fiction. For a while, I posted photographic essays, but since I don’t save this blog just for articles about reading and writing any more, I now post photos here.

The purple blog was a compilation of articles about book promotion, which I haven’t looked at for a while. I tend to think most of those articles are now outdated, but I leave them up anyway. What else can I use a blog for that’s called Book Marketing Floozy?

Then there was the orange blog I originally started to talk about all the things I did to procrastinate, which I called Dragon My Feet. (As you can see, I thought I was clever back in those days.) When I procrastinated too much to post to the blog, I turned it into a blog to promote other authors – all they had to do was send me an excerpt and links, and I’d post it for them.

Then there was the red interview blog, Pat Bertram Introduces . . ., another blog to promote other authors. All they had to do was follow the directions, and I’d post and promote an interview about them and their books.

It seems naïve now, but back at the beginning, even before I had a single book published, I thought if I promoted other authors, they would in turn promote me. Um. No. Both book blogs were popular, and I seemed to be spending hours every week posting the excerpts and interviews, but when I realized all my work did nothing to help with the sales of my books — that in all those years, only one or two authors ever thought to reciprocate — I made reciprocation “payment” for my promotional efforts. And both blogs died. (I’d also had a promo group on FB for authors to post links to their books, but it was a reciprocal thing — they had to like or share other people’s work. When I realized that they were sharing only their friend’s posts but not mine, I got vindictive and erased everyone from the group. It was too much work for nothing.)

As it turns out, it’s good I have all these blogs just sitting there. I’ll probably need a continuing range of such blogs to stay ahead of FB’s vendetta against this blog.

I tend to think the bio I put on the bottom of each blog is the issue. Originally, I had several links in the bio rather than the single link I have now, but the damage has been done. I’m certainly not going to remove the bio just to pacify the computers that run an increasingly dubious site because the bio is important. There are many automatic blogs that pick up and post any blog they can find, and for a while, they did this to me quite regularly. I could complain and get the offending blog sites removed from WordPress, but more kept springing up. Other people had the same problem, and the only recourse they had was to make sure there were a bio and links in the blog so that it would link back to the original author. So that’s what I did. This way, it doesn’t make as much difference if someone steals the whole article — the message still gets out there.

I suppose if I had used a different bio each day, the computers wouldn’t have picked up on it, but it’s too late now.

And anyway, it will give me a use for that whole rainbow’s worth of blogs.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator