Apparently Im a Spammer

I've been toying around with the idea of making a new blog. Last week, I finally started to set it up on blogger.com. I create the opening page and posted it along with several pages worth content all saved under a single draft. The idea to save all the draft content some place outside the blog as a backup occurred to me, but I decided that it wasn't worth the effort. Mind you, that "effort" would have taken about 45 seconds, but it was 2am and I thought, "surely this will be fine. It's not like it's going to disappear."

I should have listened to my first instinct.

Logging back into the blog I was greeted with a message saying that the blog had been identified as spam and it was locked.

Here's a copy of the email that they sent as well:

< Dear Blogger user, This is a message from the Blogger team. Your blog has been identified as a potential spam blog. For an explanation of what spam blogs are, please see Blogger Help: < < http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42577 < < You will not be able to publish posts to your blog until we review your site and confirm that it is not a spam blog. To request a review, please fill out the form found here: < < http://www.blogger.com/unlock-blog.... < < We will take a look at your blog and unlock it within four business days. Please note that if we do not hear from you within 20 days, we will remove your blog. < < If this blog does not belong to you, then you do not have to do anything. Any other blogs you may have will not be affected. < < Since you are an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not spam. We find spam by using an automated classifier. Automatic spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and occasionally a blog is flagged incorrectly. We sincerely apologize for this erroneous result. By using this kind of system, however, we can dedicate more storage, bandwidth, and engineering resources to users like you instead of to spammers. Thank you for your understanding and for your help in our spam-fighting efforts. < < Sincerely, The Blogger Team

The trick with this is that while I could see the opening page that I published this lock prevented me from getting to the draft that had a few hours worth of unbacked-up work in it.

I've requested the review and am guessing it'll go in my favor. I'm sure that when an actual person reviews it, they'll see it's not spam. I'm still a little anxious since I don't have any insight into the process.

Update: Upon requesting the unlock review I got the following message:

< Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of 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. < < We received your unlock request on April 12, 2008. < < On behalf of the robots, we apologize for locking your non-spam blog. Please be patient while we take a look at your blog and verify that it is not spam.

Favorite line has to be, "On behalf of the robots, we apologize for locking your non-spam blog." Makes ya think though. You really don't want to piss off the robots.