No Right Turn temporarily off air
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- Date published:
4:40 pm, August 1st, 2008 - 29 comments
Categories: blogs -
Tags: blogger, i/s, no right turn
A tale of woe from Idiot/Savant:
Sometime this afternoon, Blogger, in its infinite wisdom, decided that No Right Turn was a “spam blog” and locked it. I have naturally asked for a review, and sometime in the next two business days (yeah right) someone at blogger “customer service” will be looking at it and manually unlocking it. In the meantime, I am off the air. The blog is readable, but I cannot post.
Unfortunately, if their customer service is as sh*t as usual, then it could be a lot longer. And if they take 20 days, tough, I get deleted. Marvellous.
So, apologies for the silence, and hopefully it’ll get back up soon. In the meantime, if you use blogger, beware. If you link to other blogs (as normal blogs do), then you might be considered spam.
I/S
29 comments on “No Right Turn temporarily off air ”
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I/S if you’re reading, enjoy a break – you deserve one.
I’d be happy to help out however I can.
It was for this kind of reason that I decided it was going to be simpler to just run the blog software myself.
I/S take some time out and head down to Wellington bands go green
Felix: I’m one of these people who feels stressed when unable to blog (which makes slow news days a nightmare). Also stressful is the thought of losing five and a half years of content because of some stupid bot. Sure, I’ve got backups, but the thought of having to reupload it all and not being able to easily backlink or search is pretty horrifying.
lprent: This might be enough to make me think seriously about switching platforms. But see comments above about archives. The net tends to lock people in like that.
Outofbed: Sorry, not heading down there till tomorrow (and for a completely different form of entertainment involving funny shaped dice).
I’m just glad this has happened around a weekend, when I don’t post much anyway.
lprent: I have a server at home. It’s not doing much at the momment. Maybe I’ll look at running the software myself. Is it much hassle?
Steve W,
Easy as.
Yep. It is trivial.
You you get a reasonable number of hits then I’d suggest putting it over on Apache/Linux rather than IIS/Windows. The grunt required is considerably less, and that is even before you consider the cost of windows server (bloody expensive) compared to linux (pretty much free).
I chose to set this up on a relatively expensive way by doing it in NZ and on servers I control. But that was simply because I wanted full control in case of expansion and to stop problems like I/S had. Normal blogs don’t have quite the issues that this one did.
If anyone needs a leg up, then drop me an e-mail. Maybe we should start a little email support group for left-leaning blogs?
captcha: Tammany’s dingdong
The mind boggles…
That I can help with. There will either be a converter, or I can write something to do the task. Databases are relatively easy to play with, and I have a number of conversion tools.
There is nothing on Blogger’s knownissues.blogspot.com
There are a whole pile of complaints about other blogs being treated as “spam blogs’ in Blogger’s Help Groups
How Do I?
Something Is Broken
Publishing Trouble
and there is no answer to any of them from Blogger.
I guess everyone at Blogger has fallen asleep.
Hi idiot/savant,
I really like your blog.
I know that Iprent is trying to help you and I’m sure she will succeed, if not try wordpress.
It’s officially the Google Blogger Meltdown…
“When Algorithms Attack 5”
Urrgh – looks like their algorithm was a bit brain-dead.
Hi I/S
Ditto travellerev
I hope you get your prob sorted real soon. I look forward to your comments everyday.
I/S
Sorry to hear what’s happened. Do you think someone or some persons have been deliberately flagging it as spam? Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen such a thing happen.
Illuminatedtiger: No, its a widespread problem affecting a lot of blogs today; a bot gone wild rather than a conspiracy.
I am the author of the Google Blogger Meltdown article over at Blogger News Network, and to say that I am hopping mad does not even touch the surface.
What really irks me is the cryptic email I received. There is no indication as to why Google has decided I am running a Sblog (Spam Blog). Now it is quite possible that someone from a bad neighborhood has left a comment on some ancient post that points to a bad place, but I have over 400 articles spanning more than two years. Am I going to read every one to check?
The other thing that has me hotter than a Vindaloo curry is the fact that Blogger has no Export feature, I can’t even export my articles out to move them to a different platform.
On the plus side though, I am aloso the editor of Blogger News, and we are part of Google News, so at least I can gripe and get an audience.
I/S drop me a line in email.
Simon
Idiot/Savant
Good to see you engaging in the comments section.
Enjoy the rest, I’m sure you will be back online soon, annoying as it is. Hard to understand why this has happened, I enjoy what you have to say!
Simon: Sadly, you don’t seem to have an address posted.
Try idiotblogid at yahoo.co.uk. Though I’m seriously offline tomorrow.
And by the way, I just loathe that word, ‘spam’, also ‘blog’ – such harsh, ugly words. What is a ‘spam blog’ exactly, anyway? I thought blogs were all about freedom of speech? Oh well, at least we still have The Standard in the meantime! My favourite Left blog right now.
Tanya, I think blogs are sometimes used as the page that those dodgey looking links trying to sell you who knows what eventually re-route you too.
Does this seem to be fixed? Cos NRT is back up… I hope it is all sorted.
Yep sure does seem to be running again..
Thanks, killinginthenameof, I see what you mean. Wonder how the Nats conference is going?
I think the site never actually vanished, it’s just I/S can’t post anything new.
Urggh – that is the worst of all evil options. I thought that they’d blocked access to the site. Then at least one of your loyal friends would get hold of you.
Imagine if you missed the e-mail (I get at least a hundred per day even after the spam filter) and didn’t post for 20 days. The first time you’d find out is after the site disappears AFTER you have been zapped off the database.
There is a backup option on Blogger. But it is *ugly*. You have to modify your template. Look at “backups” on the search on the dashboard. It isn’t for the technically faint-hearted. I quailed a bit when I read it.
That’s why is is better to have a mirror site. But if it is on blogger they may block it – or block your real site….
Woo-hoo – I’m back up. Thanks for all the support and offers of help. Hopefully this won’t happen again…
[lprent: cool..]