Your Blog Is Locked

“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.” ~ Virginia Woolf, English Writer, (1882-1941)

Your blog is locked.

This was the message I got yesterday. It was Blogger's spam-prevention robots that detected that CVoD has had the characteristics of a spam blog. You believe that crap?

Perhaps it was because I just wrote about black hat techniques? Hmmm.... naw.

What's a spam blog you ask?

A spam blog (or comment spam) is a form of spamdexing. It's automatic posting of random comments and/or promoting commercial services to blogs, wikis, guestbooks, or other publicly accessible online discussion boards. Any web application that accepts and displays hyperlinks submitted by visitors may be a target.

Google's Blogger is a big target due to the ease of creating and updating its pages. In particular Blogger is prone to link spamming. Blogs engaged in this behavior are called spam blogs, and can be recognized by their irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text, along with a large number of links, usually all pointing to a single site.

Does this sound like CVoD?

It's comical... but truth be told I may have triggered the robot due to a posting error. Nonetheless, when I was locked out as a suspecting spammer and petitioned to get my access back Google wrote...

"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.

You won't be able to publish posts to your blog 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."

Needless to say, we do not approve of spamming here at CVoD.

We understand that it's a tough job to police spam and we can see Google is doing the best it can to prevent it. I was only locked out for a little under two business day - as promised.

So... even if it means I get locked out of my own space for a few days... for the pursuit to end spam, I truly believe, the end does indeed justify the means.