26 November 2009

Blogger: I'm not a spammer, please unlock my blogs!

After years of having done nothing regarding the use of Blogger/Blogspot as the vehicle for spam blogs or splogs (see this post on the subject: J-Blogosphere: The Blogspot namespace and splogs), Google finally decided to tackle the problem.  This has resulted in lots of collateral damage ("false positives"), which now includes two of my blogs:


A couple of things really grate:
  • I've been on Blogger since mid-2007.  Surely after more than two years of good behaviour, I'm not suddenly going to become King Spammer.
  • In the past, Blogger would apparently send a notice via e-mail before starting the process.  Not in this case;  I only discovered they'd been locked when I went into the dashboard.
  • During their 2008 purge, they apparently assured users that successfully reviewed blogs would be unlocked within 2 days.  My Sidewiki blog has been locked for a week now (since the 19th)!
  • In the case of TechIsrael, I was actually busy editing the blog layout when it was locked.  How does that fit the profile of some automated bot posting spam links, or whatever?

Strangely enough, the blog I set up to replace Maskil_Sidewiki has not been touched, although all posting is automated through Diigo and Google Sidewiki.  The only diference I can think of is that one of my earliest posts was submitted manually through the post editor on the dashboard, announcing that it's not a splog!

Maskil_Activity: This is not a spam blog!

It's at times like this that one starts to understand the wisdom of self-hosting!

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