Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Blogger Buzz: On Spam

Blogger on the weekend’s spam-storm-in-the-A-list-teacup. Also: CAPTCHAs on posting if their classifier identifies you as “spammy”.

Comments:

I'm having exactly the same problem as Fabrizio, and it seems that we're not alone. As of around 10 am GMT today, I've been getting asked to enter a confirmation code every time I try to post, but each time it tells me "We're sorry, but we were unable to complete your request" and won't let me progress any further. "Only" my main blog is affected - none of my secondary blogs are - which suggests that their software is classifying certain blogs as spam on an arbitrary basis. I really hope this is fixed soon as it is absolutely infuriating.
The Blogger Buzz post suggests that they're aware of, and have fixed, some problems.
Nothing is fixed. I have been locked out for two days now. All I get is:

006 Please contact Blogger Support.blog/46/41/4/lacowboy/index.html

Does anyone have a clue as to what this means?
That sucks. I always find Blogger Support hard to find -- it's in Help but isn't linked from the main Help page; here's the Contact Blogger Support page.
James, have you had any experience with the post CAPTCHA? I imagine this linkblog could look spammy to Blogger's detection mechanisms since it is made up of largely links.

If not, maybe you have enough text in your post. Or Blogger realized most spammers don't have purely link blogs, they always throw in lots of junk text.

I hope they did, but many of the users who have had to go through the CAPTCHA that I have seen had little content and lots of links.
No, no CAPTCHAs here. I appear to be non-spammy.

I'd speculate that one measure of spamminess is the variety of links: spam blogs will tend to link many times to the same site, or to the same page; real blogs will tend to link more broadly.
That is what I hoped they were doing. But knowing how some of their antispam efforts don't turn out so great I wondered.

Some non-splog linkblogs with a specific topic do post a lot of links to the same few sites over and over. Those I suspect are more likely to get caught by the splog prevention.