Monday, August 04, 2008

I'm a spam blogger! No, wait...

I woke up this morning to find an email from Blogger that this blog had been flagged as spam. Nervous that the email was a phishing attack, I logged into my Blogger account separately and found this post on the Blogger blog:

You knew that already, and now we do too. We have now restored all accounts that were mistakenly marked as spam yesterday. (See: Spam Fridays)

We want to offer our sincerest apologies to affected bloggers and their readers. We’ve tracked down the problem to a bug in our data processing code that locked blogs even when our algorithms concluded they were not spam. We are adding additional monitoring and process checks to ensure that bugs of this magnitude are caught before they can affect your data.

At Blogger, we strongly believe that you own and should control your posts and other data. We understand that you trust us to store and serve your blog, and incidents like this one are a betrayal of that trust. In the spirit of ensuring that you always have access to your data, we have been working on importing and exporting tools to make it easier to back up your posts. If you'd like a sneak peek at the Import / Export tool, you can try it out on Blogger in Draft.

Our restoration today was of all blogs that were mistakenly marked as spam due to Friday's bug. Because spam fighting inherently runs the risk of false positives, your blog may have been mis-classified as spam for other reasons. If you are still unable to post to your blog today you can request a review by clicking Request Unlock Review on your Dashboard.
First, this is kind of a rookie mistake, eh? Second, this is a pretty well written, effective message that takes responsibility. Third, an email to accompany and negate the first one would have been nice and saved me some freak out time.

What do you think?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

here I come to know that why I was facing problem to make posts on your blog,its okay.

Anonymous said...

Its really a very strange problem,but its good to know that you have solved it now.

Straight to the Point said...

Thanks for the comments, guys. I know! Such a simple mistake by Google, but at least it was quickly resolved. I haven't had any problems since then.