Jun 13
Blogger Thinks This is a "Spam Blog"
I noticed something odd the other day when adding new posts: “Word Verification” was required before I could publish anything.
Word Verification, for the benefit of the remaining few who haven’t yet encountered it, is the extra step designed to block spambots from leaving comments. It displays twisted, skewed, random letters and requires a human to look at the letters and type them into a form. This verifies that the entity attempting to leave a comment actually is a person rather than an automated program that just wants to use your blog to link to porn.
But apparently, Blogger has decided that this is a “Spam Blog,” which it defines here. To prove to the powers that be that this blog is written by a real person, I have to enter my email address (along with another set of nonsensical letters) so that a human can review my blog.
I can only assume that this is because of the aforementioned del.icio.us tags I’ve added to my blog. To get them to work, I have to leave “bookmarks” that point to this site at that site. And this word verification popped up shortly after I started tagging entries over there.
I’m actually not as miffed about this as I thought I’d be. In fact, I find it a little amusing.
At least they’re trying to monitor activity that could be suspicious. Unlike AOL, which accused me of sending out unsolicited bulk mail when I clicked on one of its own automated links to notify readers of a then-private journal, Blogger has not participated in my use of del.icio.us, so it would have no way of knowing that this is why the links began appearing. Hopefully, when a person stops by, they’ll see that this site isn’t trying to spam anyone.
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June 13th, 2006 at 10:48 pm
Sorry Patrick…but this is funny! You ARE one of the most prolific bloggers that I read on a regular basis. They shouldn’t punish you for that.
June 14th, 2006 at 11:05 am
Patrick this happened to me WAY back when when I was first uploading my AOL journal to blogger because of the pure volume of entries per day. I just kept e-mailing them several times a day to review my blog and they finally removed it.
It took about two weeks.