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:



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.

C-box, chat box and board messenging services

C-box, chat box and board messenging services

I am not particularly interested in all the stuff above, but suspect they are all about the same. Anyway I added one at the bottom of the first left sidebar. But be quick, because that has a limited shelf life as I didn't pay for it. If that is what you are looking for and you want one for yourself, go to Get a C-box. Alternatively, copy-paste any one of the 3 keywords in the search box above, tick the radio button beside "WEB" and search. Perhaps you will get what you want.

tagboard for your blog

A blogger asked about tagboard. Perhaps a messaging board service is what he wants. There is a demo on the above site. Check it out and give your feedback by leaving a comment.

Spam blogs (splogs): What to do when your blog is marked as a splog

Questions and/or complaints of blogs being marked as spam blog or splog is quite common. Result can vary. In some cases, you have to complete a word verification before you can publish a new post. In other cases, you can't even publish. In the worst case, your blog gets deleted.

What are spam blogs or splogs

spam blogs (splogs) are a big scrouge (no speak english blogger hoping for spelling correction) and a big headache for Blogger as well as us innocent bloggers. Recently, I had 2 of my blogs marked as spam blog (very innocent blog and only ocassional posting). I have to click the ? icon to complete word verification (captcha) to get a human review. One of the blog has been cleared and now waiting for another

Why there are so many spam blogs

Because Google Blogger is so generous, their generosity have been abused. There is a huge amount of splogs on the web and they clog up the search engines and suck traffic from us innocent bloggers. Blogger have to use robotic programs to hunt them down and try to eliminate them as it is not possible to do them manually (too much).

What to do when your blog is marked as a spam blog

There will be false positive and we just have to be patient, click on the ? icon, complete the captcha, and wait. It cannot be helped.

If you click on a link to find out what is going on, this will be what you will see:

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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.

AND THIS IF YOU HAVE COMPLETED CAPTCHA AND CLICK ON THE ? ICON AGAIN:

We received your unlock request on January 8, 2008. On behalf of the robots, we apologize for locking your non-spam blog. Please be patient while we take a look at your blog and verify that it is not spam.

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Signing a post with a graphic signature

I will try to add a graphic signature to the end of this post. Tell me how you like it by leaving your comments.

Instruction on how to get this image signature is given at Nice image signature for you blog posts

Poll: Should Blogger give make Autosave an option?

Vovici Online Survey Software

To help you vote, here is what I have been reporting to Blogger and pestering them to give us the option to turn Autosave on and off:

1. Doing long edit. Autosave publish unfinised edit which is visible on the web, Not desirable. I would much rather to have option of when to publish the edited post and when to let Blogger autosave for me. Using IE7, Firefox 2.0, Flock

2. Using Flock to prepare long post. Definitely took much more than 10 minutes. Autosave gave sense of complacency and didn't click SAVE NOW. I had IE7, Firefox 2.0, Flock browsers, many tabs, 2 Excel files, a few Notepad files opened. Forced to shut down. When I tried editing that post again, to my UTTER DISMAY, the great part of what I had prepared was not in the autosaved draft.

3. A blogger complained that he likes to edit his old posts, play around with its layout, etc, and if he doesn't like it, he just don't publish. But now because Blogger don't give him the option (my own words) to turn off Autosave, whatever he edited get autosaved and he has lost the original which may be actually what he wants.

4. (not sure about this because that seemed to be a rare occurance) I think Autosave save at intervals of every 10 minutes. After getting Autosaved, the SAVE button is grayed out and become not clickable. If while editing/preparing post, say, 5 minutes after that, he had to do something else if the button is still unclickable, he can't save and leave the post in peace while he go to do other things. It has actually happened to me, but I can't remember how long after the post got autosaved and I don't know how long before the SAVE button become clickable again. Further, as mentioned in 1, the half finished editing post may get published because of autosave. In circumstances like this. I would really like the option to turn off Autosave, the post remain in its unedited form on the web, then come back again to continue the editing.

5. Here is another blogger complaining about autosave:

"I'm even worse off. Autosave triggers several script errors when I
have the blogger editor open on my laptop (I think my laptop has some
usual configurations that screws up the autosave script), so I get
error messages every few seconds, and the times I've tried to recover
something from autosave, it hasn't worked anyway. I really want this
feature to die."

Really hope you vote because if I get enough response, I will try to submit result to Blogger.

Find PageRank of a site

I have a post How to easily get the Google PageRank of your blog, any pages of your blog or any other site. This involves installing the very useful Google toolbar. You can find some information on why I like the Google toolbar in these posts:

Search a website which did not provide for a site search box

FireFox with Google toolbar for your blogging tasks

My preferred way to do spell check

What is FireFox and why you should be using it (the part about Google toolbar is at the bottom of the post)

However, a reader of my blog commented he prefer not to install any toolbar to find the PageRank of a site. Is so, there are many ways you can get the PageRank of a site or any particular page of a site. As I believe the PageRank of a website can be increased by the number of backlinks (inbound links) from other sites to the site, but can be decreased by the number of outgoing links, I shall just give the URL below:

http://www.rankwhere.com/google-page-rank.php

http://www.google-pagerank.net/

http://www.findpagerank.com/
(you can simultaneously get the PageRanks of multiple sites at the above PageRank finder)

http://www.1-hit.com/all-in-one/tool.ranking.htm
(this one is supposed to give you the Google PageRank as well as the Yahoo PageRank, but when tested, don't seem to work. For example, checking on my main blog

blogger-tricks.blogspot.com

resulted in "blogger-tricks.blogspot.com has a Google PageRank of /10" and nothing else)