Google Blogger SPAM Flagged Me

After trying to save a draft to my Blogger account, I was presented with a word verification test. My first thoughts were -- did I change something in my settings while prudently sipping beer last night or is there a new publish setting that I am not aware of. It was neither.

Apparantly the word verification on the posting form is meant to be a spam reduction mechanism for BlogSpot in general and there are two potential causes. One is that my blog has been flagged as potential:

...word verification is applied to certain potential spam blogs by an automated system. Because this is automated there will necessarily be some false positives, though we're continually working on improving our algorithms to avoid these. If your blog is one of the false positives, we apologize. Having the word verification on your posting form does not prevent you from publishing and does not mean that your blog will be deleted or otherwise punished if it is not actually in violation of our policies.

Just great. First I am errantly flagged at Technorati which leaves your feed un-updated for days at a time; and now this. Then there is the pounding in my head from that last sip of beer last night -- isn't always that last sip that you should not have partook?

I can click on the orange question mark to take me to page where I can request a review of my blog. Funny thing is I got that little help tidbit by clicking on it the first time. Clicking on it again just takes right back there. This time, on the form at the bottom of the page where it asks "Was this information helpful?", I answered f*** no it wasn't helpful.

Another possible reason that I need word verification is if I have a high post rate.

If you make a large number of posts in a single day, you will be required to complete a word verification for each one, independent of whether your blog has been cleared as a potential spam or not. If this happens to you, simply complete the word verification for each post, or wait 24 hours, at which point it will be removed automatically.

This restriction can also be in place to control the load on BlogSpot servers as to prevent explicit spam. In this case, there is not a whitelisting review process to exempt individual blogs from it. Okay, this is the lesser of all the evils -- and hopefully that is the case.

One other thing this may be caused from was the labeling of tons of old posts from 2004, basically the same thing as tagging. In 2004, they did not have labels and I wanted to update some of these old posts. On my first run, I labeled around 80 or so posts with a "repub" tag -- my thoughts were that they are still useful enough to compile into categories and rereference them in a new post for each.

If the action of labeling/relabeling posts constitutes a publication to be issued on those posts, I did not see it take place. The only pages I would no of being actually published would be the page for the links to the labeled posts themselves. I only applied three or four labeling processes though.

Anywise, I am off to find this so called review request page. Maybe it will take me a day to find it and I will be dropped from the blacklist.