A WORDPRESS / BARENAKED ISLAM UPDATE: The PR folks for WordPress sent me a copy of the email that Matt Mullenweg sent the BareNaked Islam bloggers:

After reviewing this case I’ve turned your site back on. Even though this is the third Term of Service issue with your blog, you should have been contacted before your site was suspended by our Terms of Service team.

That said, publishing IP and email addresses of commenters with the invitation to harass them is a violation of our terms of service and your site harbors numerous examples that violate our ToS rule “does not contain threats or incite violence towards individuals or entities.”

Given that this has been an ongoing issue I think you should find alternative hosting. I realize that it is the holidays and happy to give you until Jan 6 to do so. You can use the “offsite redirect” upgrade to ensure all of your links continue to work and your visitors get redirected.

Finally although there was a press release from CAIR claiming to have been behind this I haven’t heard of them until today and as far as we can tell none of the ToS reports that caused the blog to be reviewed were from anyone involved with that organization. WordPress.com does not suspend blogs at the request of individuals or organizations, only for violations of our Terms of Service.

This sounds right. Is publishing commenters’ information wrong? Yes, unless the commenters have been threatening or abusive, in which case I think it’s fine. Were they? I don’t know — because when I went to the site it had been taken down. Anyway, WordPress seems to have done the right thing.