You Telling Me This Is A Spam Blog?

You wake up one morning feeling wonderful and all, sitting right in front of your computer and getting ready to start blogging when suddenly, Blogger presents you with a gift that will give your blogging experience that little something extra. Those brilliant people at Blogger presented something extra alright, an extra word verification thingamajig for everytime I want to save/post/edit a blog entry!


How is it that they are so generous in dishing out this 'gift' to me? Well, Blogger has implemented a system that can detect splogs (spam blogs) and then force them to take a Captcha 'spell this word' test. So, you see, this blog has just been 'detected' and is now being forced to take the damn Captcha test for every single post I want to create. It is damn irritating that you have to key that in everytime you want to post something or even save it as a draft! With so many Blogger outages, I save my entries frequently so I do not lose them whenever there's an outage. It's not easy trying to remember the crap you've taken so much effort to write down, you know. Now, I can't even do that without having to key in the word verification thingy every single time and that is very, very, very annoying.


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Clicking on the round orange button with the "?" sign will bring you to the page you see above. The page explains why I have that annoying Captcha thingy, their efforts at fighting splog and includes a simple form to request for a human to review my blog and verify it is not a splog. I filled up the form and sent it in, hoping my nightmare will soon end. Guess what? A freaking error message like the one below popped up. WTF?!?


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I hate all types of spam and I hope all spammers will burn in hell. I'm an advocate of all initiatives to make their lives more miserable and ours much easier. However, I do not take it lightly being labelled a spammer especially when I'm not one!!! This is not my first experience of my blog being wrongfully labelled a splog. I was working on another blog recently and was updating it with loads of stuff before making it public (no, it's not this one but another one) but never got to doing that as after just a few posts, it was quickly flagged as a splog and updating it became a real farce.

I tried getting a human reviewer to verify the authencity of my blog but the same error page keeps popping up. I searched for Blogger's support email and hope they will be of assistance but couldn't locate it. The only Blogger related email I found was bloggerbuzz@gmail.com and sent them TWO emails concerning this problem. I was disappointed I didn't get a reply like the last time I contacted a Google service. Recently, I checked the Blogger Buzz blog again and noticed they have indicated on their blog that that email is not a support email. Great! The least you could have done is have the courtesy to inform me, no? Why couldn't they have just forwarded it to the right people instead? Guess what I did? I deleted that blog!!! I was that pissed!

I didn't like the idea that my blogs were wrongfully flagged as splogs but I didn't really feel the need to do something since it didn't really affect me and the blogs weren't my personal/main blogs. Only when this blog finally received this 'innocuous gift' did I get so riled up. At present, THREE of my blogs are affected - excluding the one I deleted, so you understand how pissed I am. How is it that a blog with original content that has been in existence for nearly a year, updated frequently with over 400 blog entries and viewed nearly 100 times a day by people from all over the world be considered a splog? There are plenty of splogs out there and those are the ones that should be experiencing this type of inconvenience now, not me! Go lock their blogs up instead! It is obvious Blogger's 'splog detection system' is faulty especially when so many genuine blogs have been wrongfully flagged as splog. Doing a Google search and browsing through Google Groups will show you the extend of the 'damage'.

You can do your part in fighting splog. If you come along a blog that is not a blog, report it. Apart from Blogger's 'Flag As Objectionable' initiative which I highlighted some time back, there are websites available for you to report splogs such as Splog Reporter and SplogSpot. These splogs just clutter up the worldwide web and messes up the search results with useless content. If you want to know more on how you can fight splog, read this.

Now, please give me back my blog before I do something crazy like deleting my blog!!! I don't feel like blogging until my blogs get whitelisted for good. This is such a nuisance! Now then, you don't want my faithful readers to suffer from another round of JSYK-withdrawal syndrome, do you? ;)