Saturday, May 10, 2008

Blocked accounts: what to do when wrongly identified as Spam blogs

Google Blogger is very generous in providng this free service but it is abused by spammers who create millions of spam blogs or splogs which has no useful content and only created to earn money for the creators or for other purposes. They uses up resources and create problems not only for Blogger, for search engines, but also for genuine bloggers like you and me. The draw traffic away from us via especially the "Next blog" link in the navbar (missing in this blog as it had been hidden but you can see it as a dark blue bar at the top of Blogger Tips and Tricks). I will publish a post about the usefulness of this navbar sometime in the future.

Blogger is forced to use robotic programs to hunt these splogs, disable or delete them. Unfortunately it is a sad fact that robotic programs are often not infallible and can make mistakes (false positives) and identify yours or my blogs as splogs. A few of mine and those of my readeres had so been misidentified and owner either be required to complete word verification (captcha) inorder to publish a post:

word verification or captcha

where you are shown a graphic set of text and you have to type what you see into a field (box) to complete the word verification (to verify you are human as robots will not be able to do it), then publish. In most cases, you will be prevented from publishing or even from access to the blogs.

Normally in such cases, an alert email is sent to the email address you used to register the blog plus you will get this. Anyway, if you have been neglecting the blog and the email address, there is a chance your blog will get deleted after a certain period of time but it is still possible for you to get it back if you still want it, probably with all your old posts and comments intact.

Normally, it will take a few days for your blog to be cleared. In one very rare case, a lady got it cleared with the same day it was reported. Some of my blog took very long, and if you are not patient, you can report it to

spam appeals.

Peter Chen's nice graphic signature