Take Ownership Of Blog by ex employee – STAFF RESPONSE URGENT

ecddean · Member · Sep 23, 2013 at 12:09 pm
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We have an old blog at: http://ecdltd.wordpress.com/

It was setup by a member of staff named David James, it appears he set the blog up using his personal wordpress blog account, however we do get notification emails from customer messages and etc to his work email account: (email visible only to moderators and staff)

We are looking to take ownership of this account and can confirm identity through (email visible only to moderators and staff) or we can be in contact directly from our company domain ecdltd.com.

We contacted the ex employee directly, who did not respond with the professional maturity I expected and has instead threatened to delete the blog entirely.

Could a member of staff please help resolve this issue, firstly by stopping the blog from being deleted.
supportbot · Member · Sep 23, 2013 at 12:09 pm
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You did not specify a blog address or reason for posting when you created this topic.

This support forum is for blogs hosted at WordPress.com. If your question is about a self-hosted WordPress blog then you’ll find help at the WordPress.org forums.

If you don’t understand the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org, you may find this information helpful.

If you forgot to include a link to your blog, you can reply and include it below. It’ll help people to answer your question.

This is an automated message.
1tess · Moderator Emeritus · Sep 23, 2013 at 12:20 pm
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I’ve placed a modlook on this thread so staff will see it. If you subscribe to this topic you’ll be notified when there is a response.

Note: staff can see the redacted email address. It’s hidden so spam bots won’t be harvesting it for nefarious purposes.
1tess · Moderator Emeritus · Sep 23, 2013 at 12:26 pm
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Unfortunately it appears that the former employee has already deleted the blog.
ecddean · Member · Sep 23, 2013 at 12:34 pm
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Yes indeed they have, hopefully wordpress should have a cooling off period where data is stored for some time for reactivation. If not then that is ridiculous that someone has the power to do this.

I have a offline backup of the whole blog, in HTML format.
1tess · Moderator Emeritus · Sep 23, 2013 at 12:45 pm
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WordPress identifies account ownership by the email used to set up the account. Apparently you authorized your employee set up the account with his email address so he was the owner of the site. At this point the site is gone, but it may be possible to use your backup to set up a new account.

WordPress does not recycle urls so you’ll have to choose a different name. https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/blog-name-recovery?replies=2#post-1415193

I don’t know, so staff will have to help:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/export/

It’s your content; you can do whatever you like with it. Go to Tools -> Export in your WordPress.com dashboard to download an XML file of your blog’s content. This format, which we call WordPress eXtended RSS or WXR, will contain your posts, pages, comments, categories, and tags.

Import a Website
ecddean · Member · Sep 23, 2013 at 2:43 pm
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We do not have access to the account to make a backup as already explained, he has not worked for us for just over a year and today my boss realized about the blog and we wanted to update some information – I tried to get access but that’s when the ex employee (bitter over his sacking I presume) replied nastily to my request and proceeded to delete the blog.
ecddean · Member · Sep 23, 2013 at 2:45 pm
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Surely WordPress can re-instate the blog and give us ownership, as a company it is very easy for us to prove who we are by mail, email, domain authentication (put a file up on the domain) and can even make a one off payment from the company account to verify ourselves.

I don’t see why this could not be done for us.
1tess · Moderator Emeritus · Sep 23, 2013 at 3:37 pm
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As I said first, this thread is marked for staff attention.
The site has been deleted. As for proof of ownership there is this support article:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/account-recovery/#account-recovery-form
Beyond the information I’ve given you already, we volunteers cannot help. These are public forums, indexed within minutes by Google, so it would be best to subscribe and wait for staff response.
auxclass · Member · Sep 23, 2013 at 3:41 pm
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Search engine caches have at least some of the old info, that is another source of what was done. Saves typing and pictures can be downloaded to your PC
timethief · Member · Sep 23, 2013 at 3:41 pm
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You can copy and paste the indexed content from the deleted ecdltd.wordpress.com blog from Google’s cache into new posts and pages in a new blog the you register and own.
timethief · Member · Sep 23, 2013 at 3:43 pm
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You can capture any indexed images from the deleted ecdltd.wordpress.com blog found in Google’s image cache.
1tess · Moderator Emeritus · Sep 23, 2013 at 3:51 pm
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https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/take-ownership-of-blog-by-ex-employee-staff-response-urgent?replies=12#post-1450450

I have a offline backup of the whole blog, in HTML format.

The html can be used to make a new blog (and somehow I had exporting and importing in my brain).
I think the problem is with the name of the blog being gone. It could be called anything, and mapped to an appropriate name, such as the company’s website.
http://en.support.wordpress.com/add-a-domain/
jackiedana · Member · Sep 23, 2013 at 11:38 pm
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If the user who owned the site in question deleted the blog, that was within their right to do so.

My recommendation is to try to restore content through your backup and Google’s cache as our volunteers have recommended.

Also for what it’s worth, the email address for both the blog owner and the blog notifications was not the email address given in this thread.

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