Wednesday, August 06, 2008

So Apparently This is Spam

You'd think I'd be making more money. (Or, well, money. Notice advertising links? Neither do I.)

Yes, apparently I got one of those emails giving some dire warning about how the site is a source of spam and will be shut down forever unless I request a reset. I figured it for spam of its own, but was a bit curious, and discovered a lot of other people actually getting shut down.

And then there's this:

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.
Obviously I'm not affected, or you wouldn't be able to read this.

But it has made me realize that I take this a bit for granted. I've probably got one of the oldest continually-running political blogs out there at this point, and it'd be unfortunate if it all disappeared overnight. (I'd certainly miss the stuff with ol' Steve Den Beste, wherever he got to.) I'll have to see about using that tool to back this thing up.

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