Flagged?
When Jean at Catholic Fire emailed me today that her blog had been marked as spam I didn't realize how widespread this was. The Anchoress reports that the same thing has happened to Happy Catholic, Deacons Bench, and the Paragraph Farmer. So it looks like there is some effort to take down some of my favorite blogs on blogspot. The blogs still show up, but the authors are locked out from updating and must file a report with Google to get someone to look at their blog first which takes a while. It does make me glad that I host my own blog instead of being at the whim of Google.
Not long ago there was a concerted effort to take down pro-Hillary blogs likely from Obama supporters and this has also been happening to other conservative blogs.
I was always rather dubious of the Flag Blog button at the top of blogspot blogs and was a reply to the spammers who poison everything. Though in this case Google treats you as guilty until proven innocent. Some bloggers who suffered this problem moved to wordpress.com.
Hopefully this will be resolved soon.
Update: Nice to find out that this was just a glitch that happened throughout blogspot blogs. Sometimes it is too easy to jump to conclusions.
Known as 
Creative Minority Report has posted about this too. Seems like it's happening rather quickly.
This had also happened to me when I mocked some foolish IT guy who claimed to be an expert on extending human life, and I don't have a wide-read blog. I merely blogged about the danger of wanting to play god in a scientific arena, and wondered who would want to live forever on earth and put the real eternal life on hold. They didn't like me and shut me down for many days. I can't stand the "somne pig are more equal than others" mentality that seems to be creping along in some web circles.
Instapundit had a little something on this -- and I believe someone has described this phenomenon as Google having a brain fart. It's evidently pretty random. Oy.
Dcn. G.
Yep, happened to me too. I was locked out last night, reported it immediately and was finally able to get back on just a little bit ago.
http://maureenwittmann.blogspot.com/2008/08/maureen-evil-spammer.html
Canterbury Tales has been locked out as well.
Sr. Anne of "Nun Blog" writes:
When we sign up for these free services, we are at the mercy of the service provider.
We can be screened, edited, or (as I was) summarily booted out, and we have no court of appeal because this is a private enterprise.
That's perfectly legitimate, but my experience this week told me not to take too much for granted.
Just two days before I found myself exiled from the Facebook community, I published a post about a pro-life video that had been taken down by YouTube for violating unstated criteria.
I kind of wondered if my FB experience was in some way related to my having put that post on my FB page and not only on my blog... In other words, is Orwell's Big Brother online?
If you have a blogger account, and you write a truth that someone does not appreciate, they merely need to click "FLAG BLOG" at the top of the page, and you're locked out.
Apparently, this was how Obama fans were eliminating Hillary bloggers in June.
I don't know if this is readers or Google themselves, but it looks like they are tyring to do something... This was a notice under on blogger today:
"While we wish that every post on this blog could be about cool features or other Blogger news, sometimes we have to step in and admit a mistake.
We've noticed that a few users have had their blogs mistakenly marked as spam, and wanted to sound off real quick to let you know that, despite it being Friday afternoon, we are working hard to sort this out. So to those folks who have received an email saying that your blog has been classified as spam and can't post right now, we offer our sincere apologies for the trouble.
We hope to have this resolved shortly, and appreciate your patience as we work through the kinks."
I had my blog falsely id'd as spam some time ago, but I was able to keep posting, just had to constantly type in a verification word. They cleared it up in a few days.
My buddies over at Beers with Demo got locked out, too. I wonder if it's just happening to right-leaning blogs.
It wasn't that much of a big deal for me. I got locked out for awhile, and missed some comments...but a few hours later, all was well. (Besides, I really shoulda been working rather than blogging, so it was probably a good thing.)
This sorta thing is pretty (or not all that "pretty") common with blogspot, but hey, the price is right! ;-)
In any case coincidence, google problems or not, it should serve as an example to people. The Catholic blogging you all do is important, o and protect it with a wordpress.com blog or a wordpress installation on your own URL, because this is not as far fetched as it may seem now.
The spammers will potentially only get worse and the good bloggers already have to suffer for their bad actions. Why else would an account get suspended BEFORE someone looks at it? (Which is blogger's policy) Because a spammer needs to be locked out. And the real blogger? He needs to justify him/herself.
Like I said. Wordpress is the way to go. If anybody needs help to install a custom installation on their own domain, I am glad to help.
Jeff,
I wonder if there is some sort of bug or trojan out there that is preventing me from accessing ANY Catholic blogs.
This is the error message I get on Internet Explorer when I go to ANY Catholic blog:
"Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://custosfidei.blogspot.com/.
Operation aborted."
I get this even accessing your Curt Jester blog.
I've downloaded Firefox 3.0 and that error doesn't appear when I use Firerox 3.0.
I was wondering if you know what that means? Or any of your readers.
Tito, I just tried to open the Curt Jester in IE and found the same problem as you did. Very strange. Sticking to Firefox seems to be the way to go, I guess.
Happened to me, too. Paladin thought it was because of his first guest post on my blog.
Yeah - spam issue on blogger hit me too, along with the Internet Explorer abort error resulting from some major issue over at Sitemeter.
You can't get to Fr. Z's blog yet (as of 10:14am Saturday EDT) on IE. I've emailed him the fix, but he may not be able to get to his account yet.
It's sitemeter not Blogger and appears to be fixed....
Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://custosfidei.blogspot.com/.
Operation aborted."
This is the message I got for every Catholic blog I tried to access through Google. I changed to MSN homepage and it let me through no problem.
Google doing some anti-Catholic editing I guess.
We have also experienced the same problem with C-L-S and have yet to get it resolved. We are trying to find the script that is overloading our Host's server (Midphase) and get them to release our account's suspension. It seems like many more people use sitemeter than are being brought down?
Could you give this a little publicity please:
Saint Conleth’s Catholic Heritage Association invites you to honour the Holy Year of St. Paul by attending Holy Mass in the Traditional Latin Rite (Missal of Blessed John XXIII) on Saturday, 30th August, 2008, at 11 a.m., in St. Paul’s Church, Emo, Co. Laois, Ireland, followed by a tour of Emo Court House and Gardens.
For the past 15 years, St. Conleth’s Catholic Heritage Association has been working prayerfully for the provision of the Traditional Latin Liturgy in the Diocese of Kildare and Leighlin.
Please confirm your attendance to: catholicheritagegroup@catholic.org
For further details consult:
www.catholicheritage.blogspot.com
God bless you!
Saint Conleth’s Catholic Heritage Association
I was locked-out for about 24 hrs. last Thurs. evening/Friday. Google has apologized profusely blaming a spam detection software glitch. Because of either naivete' or implicit trust, I'm inclined to believe them.
KT's friends at Beers with Demo
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