Monday, April 21, 2008

Oh, for Christ's sake . . .

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.


Dare I ask what, exactly, are the "characteristics" my blog shares with spam?

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

Spam blog, hm? Well, you did blog a story about artificial, vat-grown meat, the other day...

Anonymous said...

Ha ha! I didn't even notice you'd blogged about the vat grown meat again, right below this post.

Your pro vat-grown meat stance is definitely the reason.

Peggy K said...

I had that happen to one of my blogs as well. As far as I can tell, it was because I was posting a lot of links. The good thing is that once you have a human review your blog, it won't be flagged again.

Anonymous said...

What's with the template change?

It does not look as good as the prior one. Why change it?

Mac said...

I've been fooling around with various template options and I actually like this one. (I miss the masthead, though.) I think I'll keep it more or less intact to see of it grows on me; "different" can be a little jarring, even if it's just a blog template.

Personally, I think the new format makes for easy reading, but I suppose that's a call best left to you, the readers.

Thanks for the feedback!

PA said...

Had this happen to me on a couple of my blogs.

Usually happened when I posted 5 or so new posts in a short period of time.

Anonymous said...

I think it's because your entries are delicious fried and served with eggs over-easy.

Mac said...

Bsti--

Oh, no doubt!

Anonymous said...

I miss the thick-sliced Canadian bacon, myself...

Blues Tea-Cha said...

You didn't know about BLOGGER's REP-DETECT division, did you. Very few *humans* are working there, of course. It takes one to know one. That's funny they pegged you as an a.i.

What did it, I think, is that Posthuman Blues is statistically heavy on quoted content from other sources. You would think that might be offset by your statistically improbable phrases which are original. However, the spambots can easily spoof original content by randomly harvesting words and arranging them in grammatically accurate templates, so the REP-DETECT bots wouldn't have the intelligence to know the difference.

I'd ask you to make your quotes shorter and your comments longer, using more paraphrasing, too, but don't you write for a LIVING?

Still, you have to wonder if you really *are* a spambot, programmed to believe it is doing something very unspamlike and worthwhile… don't you?

Keep the faith.

Mac said...

That's funny they pegged you as an a.i.

Just as long as they don't send any blade runners after me!

I'd ask you to make your quotes shorter and your comments longer, using more paraphrasing, too, but don't you write for a LIVING?

While I do make money writing, thus making me a "professional writer," I'm still not doing it for a living. However, that's my ambition.

The content here at PB varies. Sometimes I'm so enamored of a post that I feel almost obligated to link to it. Other times I get on essay-writing binges. Over the years I've found that both approaches tend to compliment one another. If nothing else, it keeps the blog from becoming suffocatingly self-indulgent.

Blues Tea-Cha said...

i mean
since you are a professional writer
your readers will happily take what they can get.
a daily review of the WWW filtered through Mac's brain is fine,
--just like a newspaper with AP news stories--
only Mac is the editor. We like that!
it's a little more like stumble-upon than the average "self-indulgent" blog.
on the other hand,
if you have "content" (sorry to use that word)
such as self-indulgent rants, essays, and original works of art or fiction
(isn't that what blogs are for?)
which don't fit into any current potentially profitable writing project,
we'd be grateful for those as well!
:-)

Mac said...

I'm an organic Web-filter! :-)