Blogger (Google) to the BOOT: You're spam and you're out of here

It has been a very trying weekend for your BOOT blogger. On Friday I received an email from Blogger (with a capital "B" and owned by Google) telling me that

"Your blog at: http://tims-boot.blogspot.com/ has been identified as a potential spam blog."

I was given 20 days to lodged an appeal and have the blog re-instated. In the meantime I could not post any new items.

Blogger was full of apologies this morning. They returned by access to the blog, blaming this on a bug that caused problems for a large number of blogs. Here is what they said

"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."

For those interested here is a screen shot of what it means to be locked out of Blogger



thanks to allspice1 over at flickr for the photo