Blogger Locked Me Out

After a full week of just not having the time to post due to a work commitment, I came to find that my blog had been "locked" by robots on suspicion that I was a "spam blog" (aka "splog"). Regardless of how you feel about my writing or grammar ;) my content is indeed created by a human (and not robots), my links don't all point to the same site, and I'm really not pulling in adsense worth mentioning at all.

So I gotta wonder why my site got flagged. Because they don't tell you why it got flagged. Nor do they tell you how long the queue to get whitelisted is, or where you are in it. They just tell you that a human has to review your site and that it usually takes 24 hours. My site took more than 48hrs but some people have had to wait longer, and some have even lost their entire site in the process.

I'm just flummoxed. I applaud efforts to fight spam but this process is broken. Many real bloggers are having their blogs locked down and the only option is to submit to be reviewed and then wait. The review process clearly takes too long (due to an uneccessarily long queue of incorrently flagged blogs perhaps?) and the robots apparently aren't very smart. And they hate freedom.

I suppose the good news is that I no longer have to type a captcha every time I post. I thought Blogger had turned on some blogger-wide anti-splog mechanism and it turns out that is turned on in blogs that are initially suspected of splogging. And theoretically there is a way to get whitelisted at that point, but I suppose typing in gobs of pull-your-hair-out-annoying captchas correctly (and quite a few incorrectly...is that two v's or a w? a g or a q? aaaargh!!!) over the past couple of months was not enough to prove I'm human.

I couldn't even update my template to somehow alert the 3 people who might care what was going on. Anyway, I'm back ... and woefully behind so i better get to it...

Tags:

• blogging
• misc