Am I on the Spam Blog List?

Yesterday, Darrell posted a suggestion that I try to look for something near the visual verification box that I get everytime I try to login to Blogger to post a new article. This would also explain why the email and Word post features have stopped working as they can easily be automated and allow bots with bintentions to post unseemly articles or advertisements.

I’m entirely uncertain how I got onto this list. In over two years of writing BC, we still have yet to reach 300 total posts so I doubt the problem results from a algorithm that searches from blogs with too many posts. I do have over 500 comments that have not been moderated which are all spam and I never went into the blogger interface to delete all of them but this number has hardly grown since blogger has added the visual verification code to the add comment feature which was pretty long ago so, unless the algorithm regarding unmoderated comments has changed recently, this shouldn’t be the source of the problem.

I do post to the blog from a number of different IP addresses including my home, various hotels, friends’ homes, Starbucks, Asia and the fairly random locations of conferences about this stuff that I attend with some irregularity.

I think I read somewhere that a random reader can file complaints about a blog hosted on blogger that contains content offensive to them. This may add an extra level of complexity to the process because, as any regular reader already knows, BC does not pull punches. I ocasionally use profanity in a quote from one of my fictitious characters as it fits with their personae and once in a while I’ll use foul language to emphasize a point. I grew up in New Jersey where such language is used everywhere and to describe everything so the little bit sprinkled throughout BC can actually be considered tame by the standards we had in my adolescent social life.

Also, if anyone did do something to this blog to get us onto a black list, we will take the high road and not try to retaliate as, while I encourage childishness, I don’t like resentment very much.

Note: I wrote this item in the blogger interface and do not know how to use its spell checker so please excuse any words that look or sound a little funny.

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