Spam I Am

In case you were wondering what had become of The Rap Sheet this last weekend, why nothing new was appearing on the site, the answer isn’t that we were taking a vacation away from the screen (no matter how deserved that might be). On the contrary, we were endeavoring to post new stuff ... but were stopped dead in our tracks by Blogger, the Google-owned blog-publishing system that hosts this site. For reasons still unspecified, The Rap Sheet had been misidentified by “Blogger’s spam-prevention robots” as a “spam blog,” a site engaged in the nefarious practice of “link spamming,” some sort of search engine result manipulation.

God knows what ticked off those damn robots, but we received a blunt message on Friday afternoon telling us that we were at least temporarily forbidden from posting anything new to The Rap Sheet. A link gave us the not-too-hopeful option of proving that a human being, rather than some sort of prankish computer program, was behind The Rap Sheet. (Guilty until proven innocent!) But after we followed the instructions given, all that came back was this message:

Your blog is locked

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.

We received your unlock request on June 1, 2007. 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.

Find out more about how Blogger is fighting spam blogs.

There was no specification of how long this block might last, or anything more about how to get it lifted. And every time we sought to post something new, this message came up:

This blog has been locked by Blogger’s spam-prevention robots. You will not be able to publish your posts, but you will be able to save them as drafts.

Save your post as a draft or click here for more about what’s going on and how to get your blog unlocked.

Needless to say, this was a stress-producing development. We’d just gotten through publishing our extensive first-anniversary list of overlooked and underappreciated crime novels--a venture that doubled our daily traffic--and suddenly The Rap Sheet was disabled. There was no chance to capitalize on all this new attention. Worse, when we started to look around for ways to contact Blogger and get its people to unblock The Rap Sheet with due haste (an impossible task, as it seems nobody in authority works at Blogger over the weekends), we found myriad help group complaints from other Blogger users whose pages had been similarly blocked. And several said it had taken them a week or more to solve the problem! That only spurred us to flood Blogger’s support offices with pleas for expeditious attention. (In case you ever need to contact Blogger for assistance, here’s a useful page of contact info and FAQs.)

We tried to forget about this nightmare. Tried to bury ourselves in reading (only minimally successful), exercise (not helpful in the least), and copious consumption of alcoholic beverages (helpful, but we lost our car keys in the process). However, nothing really helped. Not even a return to work on that dusty novel that it seems we’ve been writing ever since the wheel was invented.

Then, finally, on Monday morning this e-mail message came through:

Hello,

Your blog has been reviewed, verified, and cleared for regular use so that it will no longer appear as potential spam. If you sign out of Blogger and sign back in again, you should be able to post as normal. Thanks for your patience, and we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

Sincerely,
The Blogger Team

“Any inconvenience”? How ’bout apologizing for the four clumps of hair we extracted from the sides of our head, while waiting for this communication to arrive?

Sure, we understand that Blogger might want to prevent the spread of spam blogs. But if it’s going to send robots out to hunt for such malefactors, there really out to be a breathing, burping human being who does a quick double-check before those robots shut down somebody’s blog on a Friday afternoon--with no chance that service will be restored over the weekend. That seems no more than a common courtesy. Some of us, after all, are serious about blogging, thinking that our words matter. A wee bit, anyway.

I hope that none of you other Blogger users have to go through this same sort of nightmare.