Pages

▼

18 October 2008

I'm a happy little blogger!

Earlier this week somebody at Blogger made my day.
A couple of months ago a robot decided that my blog was a spam blog.
I was never sure what the criteria being used was, but then Blogger told me that I had been wrongly identified and someone would look at my blog and restore my "rights".
Ironically other blogs that I wrote, Smik's Reviews, and Smik's Learning Space, were unaffected.

Anyway it had 2 major effects on me as a blogger
  • every time I wanted to save a post I had to jump a word verification hurdle. I frequently failed it because not only did it change font and style but also the letters were often run into each other.
  • along with that was the fact that autosave was turned off. I lived in constant fear that my computer or browser would crash and my posting would be lost.
The only court of appeal that I discovered was that each week I could complete a special word verification that sent a message to Blogger that I was not a spam blogger. So every Monday for about 8 weeks I dutifully sent off the special message. Meanwhile I had discovered that while there is a forum you can lodge a posting in, and discover that many others have the same problem, seemingly unanswered, and there are messages that come from Blogger with the names of people as the signatory, there is no human you can actually email. Funny that.

Then on Monday night this week I noticed that my purgatory was over. Perhaps the fact that I had created yet another related blog Crime Fiction Journeys had bumped me up the priority list, or perhaps there really was a person, poor thing, wading through a visual verification list.
Anyway I'm back to normal! Just for the record, it began on 3 August. Since then I've written 96 posts.
at

4 comments:

  1. sally90618 October 2008 at 09:23

    You see - good things come to those who wait - even if they are waiting a little impatiently :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous18 October 2008 at 23:00

    You have identified why I hate commenting on Blogger blogs! The spam verification is exactly as you say, and frequently requires several "goes" to get it right because of their silly fonts (some of which render characters such as l and i identical) and run-ins. At least typepad has distinguishable characters even though the contrast with the background is often insufficiently distinct. Nothing is as bad as Blogger spam verification, I do wish they would do something about it as it does not need to be so unreadable to avoid spam.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Marg20 October 2008 at 10:06

    Finally!

    Not too long ago I took the word verification off of my blog, and I don't regret it at all.

    Whilst Blogger's words are a pain there are some other out there that are even worse, and as soon as I see those I actually contemplate not sending my comment at all because just getting past that stage is going to be such a hassle!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Kerrie20 October 2008 at 18:34

    I followed your example, 2 or 3 weeks back Marg, and took the word verification off. I haven't had spam problems... yet

    ReplyDelete

If you want to leave a direct link to your blog posting, click name, you will see the URL field opening up. Type your name and leave your blog posting's URL and readers will be able to jump straight to your blog.
======================
Thank you also for your interest in my blog.
From time to time you will find these comments have been put into moderation - I'll try to approve them as quickly as I can.