24 February 2006

Amusement of the day.

Blogger has apparently decided this is a "spam blog," created by some automatic content generator.


Your blog requires word verification

Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What's a spam blog?) Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive.

Before we can turn off mandatory word verification on your posts we'll need to have a human review your blog and verify that it is not a spam blog. Please fill out the form below to get a review.

Find out more about how Blogger is fighting spam blogs.

Remove word verification from posts

Word Verification:
Type the characters you see in the picture below.

stqwqy

Email Address:
****
We'll contact you after we review your blog.

Send Request



What, all this just because I post frequently? How sweet. Or do they think I'm just cutting and pasting content from elsewhere? Oh wait...

ETA: Took me three tries to type the stupid random letters right for the word verification! *grr*

8 comments:

Morris said...

Awesome, you can spam my blog anytime!

Mr. Morris
Ask Morris

TS said...

That happened to me once too. Took them three days to get back and unlock the bloody word verification.

Bora Zivkovic said...

Lots of links will do it, especially if many links go to the same source (e.g., Nature Mag, or another blog).

One of my blogs is tagged like this. You can and should contact them to explain that this is not a splog.

Allison M. said...

You should like this. Proliferation of spam blogs reduces interest in the "Next Blog" button, due to the likelihood that you'll have to troll through dozens of spam blogs to see any real ones. So random traffic to your blog goes down (at least that's my theory).

At least they didn't take your blog offline or something draconian like that. Word-verification "captchas" are a pain in the butt, but they do prevent auto spam posting.

zandperl said...

Thanks for the friendly comments y'all. I did do their request for manual review on Friday, who knows how long it'll take...

Does anyone know, when they say "lots of links," do they mean to anywhere, to the same top-level page/domain/site (ex: www.cnn.com, en.wikipedia.org), or to the same specific page within the site?

Bora Zivkovic said...

It is usually when a person has multiple Blogger blogs that keep linking to each other. I have a "shadow" blog that I use for archives, blogroll, etc. so there is profuse cross-linking between the two, so the archive blog is using captchas.

Maggie said...

I had someone spamming my blogs on blogger. Whoever was doing it had several names and the comments were always similar. The url took me to a blog that was set up as though it was the diary of a forest worker, and it took me to a url for Wrigleys chewing gum. Beware I think that somewhere along the way it had malicious code.

It is possible that whoever did this used your blog for something similar and it was reported. That is why you might have been blacklisted.

zandperl said...

Maggie:
Spam comments can also be removed - look for the little trash can icon on the comments page. You may have noticed I have mine set up for manual approval before posting, then I can catch spam comments, but it takes longer for them to get up. You could instead do word verification, but that puts the extra time burden on your readers, which I prefer not to do.