Hi Everyone,
My blog, Marty’s Bag of Tricks, is currently broken. It seems that one of Google’s automated security systems has locked my Blogger site. This means that all of the links to trick tutorials on Substack are also broken. I’m very sorry for the inconvenience this might be causing you.
If you visit the site at the moment, this is the rather alarming message you’ll see:
Blog has been removed
Sorry, the blog at martysbagoftricks.blogspot.com has been removed. This address is not available for new blogs.
Did you expect to see your blog here? See: ‘I can’t find my blog on the web, where is it?’
Rest assured that I haven’t removed or deleted my blog. I’m hoping that this is an accidental “technical hiccup” that will be fixed soon. Here’s the error message I currently see when I log in using the blog’s admin console:
The error message in the image reads:
Note: This blog has been locked
We received the request for a review on 4 Aug 2026. Blogger will re-evaluate the blog to verify that it is not in violation of community guidelines.
I have no idea why this has happened. I also received a fairly cryptic, somewhat scary email from Google, which said:
Why was your blog removed?
Your content has violated our Malware and similar malicious content policy. Please visit our community guidelines page linked in this email to learn more.
If you have any further questions about malware and your blog, you can follow up by posting to our Help Forum.
If you believe that we made an error, you can request an appeal, which must be done within the next 90 days. Appeals are typically resolved within 10 working days, though some more complex cases may take longer. If your appeal is approved, you will hear a response. You may have the option to pursue your claims in court. If you have legal questions or wish to examine legal options that may be available to you, you may want to consult with your own legal counsel.
Now, as far as I’m aware, there’s no malware on my site. I updated the theme recently, but I don’t think I did anything that would have triggered this type of warning. The updates were all fairly innocuous changes to the site’s styling (CSS).
Unfortunately, I have no other option but to sit tight and wait for a human reviewer at Google to look at my blog and (hopefully) unlock it. 🤞
I’ll let you all know when the blog is back. Once again, I’m very sorry for the technical difficulties! 😵💫
Yours Magically,
Marty