Lemming Tracks: Skittish in Cyberland

The Lemming ended yesterday's posts with one about this blog being blocked, and then unblocked. ("Lemming Tracks: Not the Lemming's Most Serene Day" (August 26, 2009)) This is a sort of sequel to that post.

Checking my email, I found an automated message from Blogger, telling me that this blog had been "identified as a potential span blog." Which I already knew: but it's good to know their system is thorough. The message also told me how to submit a request for review - which I'd already done.

And, saving me the time and postage of printing out a snail-mail message and sending it to toward the west coast, the third paragraph answered - in general terms - my question about what happened. Essentially, the message explained, Blogger uses software that does a fuzzy search for spam.

The good news is that Blogger can use this to free up more bandwidth and storage space by flagging and (eventually) deleting bogus blogs.

The bad news is that sometimes people get the experience I had. I'm down to checking the dashboard every few hours for another false positive - which is progress.

The good news is that their review process worked more rapidly than I thought it might.

Which is a good thing, since if you'd visited this blog while it was flagged, you'd have seen a warning sign. Not the sort of welcome I want you to have.

I've got an educated guess about what got me flagged, too: although I could be wrong. Not long before that message got sent, I'd posted a micro-review about a news item that discussed dangerous search terms, and unscrupulous website developers. This is, again, just guesswork: but I think the content of that post may have been what got the robot's attention.

Live and learn - I just hope this post doesn't go over the threshold.