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”.
7:18 PM |
permanent link
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
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.
Michael | October 19, 2005 10:16 AM | permanent link
The Blogger Buzz post suggests that they're aware of, and have fixed, some problems.
James | October 19, 2005 8:07 PM | permanent link
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?
006 Please contact Blogger Support.blog/46/41/4/lacowboy/index.html
Does anyone have a clue as to what this means?
Brady Westwater | October 20, 2005 12:23 AM | permanent link
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 | October 20, 2005 7:06 AM | permanent link
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.
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.
JoeC | October 20, 2005 10:06 PM | permanent link
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.
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.
James | October 20, 2005 10:58 PM | permanent link
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.
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.
JoeC | October 21, 2005 10:30 AM | permanent link
