I remain surprised that the Social Media Consortium blog is still not back to normal. While it can be accessed, we have not been able to post to it since late July. Google, which owns Blogger, the platform the site uses to blog from, has accused the SMC of being a spam blog.
   There are some cross-posts, and Vincent Wright (the blog owner) and I put in links to other sites, but isn’t that the whole principle of the internet?
   When we try to post, we get this message:

Your blog is marked as spam
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.
   Your readers are seeing a warning page until one of our humans reviews it and verifies that it is not a spam blog. Please fill out the form below to get a review. We’ll take a look at your blog and unlock it in less than two business days.
   If we don’t hear from you, though, we will remove your blog from Blog*Spot within a few weeks.
   Find out more about how Blogger is fighting spam blogs.

   There are quite a few things wrong with this. Both Vincent and I have written to Google about the matter over the past few weeks (almost all of August). As a result, the blog has gone from invisible to visible publicly, but it doesn’t show up on our Blogger dashboards. (In other words, we have to really hunt for a link for us to even blog here.)
   As far as I know, our readers are not seeing a warning page, but the blog properly. It has even popped up, though not as readily any more, in Google with the correct content. So that claim by Blogger is not accurate.
   And as for filling in forms, again, we’ve been doing this. In fact, I did so a week ago. Then two days ago. And again today. So much for the promise that someone at Google will examine this blog and ‘unlock it in less than two business days.’
   I am a bit sick of filling in forms anyway, since I question whether they get to anyone.
   Google is usually really good at getting stuff sorted (especially compared with Facebook), but I wonder why it has messed up here. (It also messed up the home page for the Beyond Branding blog, and three years later, we are still waiting for that to be fixed, despite countless messages.) Having said that, most of my other Blogger blogs are all right and my only recent complaint has been long publishing times.
   Here’s hoping the SMC will be back online, properly, soon, and that Google is simply being over-optimistic on its two-day estimate. Posted by Jack Yan, 23:46  permalink

comments

Post a Comment  Links to this post