ricketyclick

[update: Blogger has acknowledged the problem, and is working to fix it, "despite it being Friday afternoon", which last I am entirely sympathetic with.]

Blogger, the blogging tool hosted by Google, has for maybe a week now been blocking many sites on apparently false charges of being “spam blogs”. Although the sites are still viewable, victims cannot author new posts. Judging by the posts on the Google Help Group here, Blogger is not responding to appeals in a timely fashion. (Granted, though, that they’ve got more than a thousand requests to work through.)

I first became aware of this via David Codrea’s excellent The War on Guns. Codrea was able to activate a sidebar widget (over there on the left) explaining the situation.

Oddly, comments seem to work.

Codrea is, rightfully, I think, reluctant to move, since War on Guns is a very active site with huge archives. (Including the absolutely invaluable Only Ones archive.) It doesn’t help that apparently WordPress cannot import any images associated with Blogger posts. (Can that be right? It seems like such an obvious thing to fix.) Also, he has been using a free Blogger account, and if he goes to WordPress, he’ll have to pay for hosting.

[update: I've been checking around, and it looks like there are migration tools that will in fact bring your pictures over.]

Nevertheless, he’s set up a WordPress site here, holding it in reserve pending resolution of the Blogger glitch.

This is a very tempting tin-foil-hat moment, but it’s not limited to gun blogs, or right-wing blogs, or even political blogs. Knoxviews speculates it might be some kind of anti-spammer bot that Blogger unleashed on itself, which then ran amuck on a rash of false positives. I wonder if it’s a denial-of-service attack which robotically clicks “flag as spam” buttons.

I am so very, very glad I elected to use an independent host (thank you, Hosting Matters), even though I have to pay for the privilege. (I’ve registered the domain through 2011, and my hosting fee is currently $11/month — negligible even on my very limited budget, and there are cheaper hosts out there.) And I think WordPress is a vastly better tool than Blogger, even out of the box with little or no customization.

Fair warning to those who find themselves investing time, effort, and other resources on free sites they do not control.

I’ve installed the Bad Behavior spam filter, which is aimed at automated attacks (see the Comment Policy on the sidebar). It should present no barrier to real commenters. Please let me know via email if it does.

[update]

Wow. It’s only been a few minutes since I installed the filter, and it’s already blocked six spams. I’ll note that Wordpress says that almost 16,000 comments have been marked as spam since ricketyclick’s inception, and I know I didn’t mark them all by hand, so some have been rejected by other methods.

Originally, I wasn’t posting the name of the plugin, for fear of giving out clues to the spammers. Then I realized Bad Behavior announced itself in the page footer, with a Blocked Spam counter. I could turn that off, I guess, but I’m assuming that the BB writers wouldn’t do that if knowing about the plugin substantially increased vulnerability. Anyway, “security through obscurity” is generally a weak approach. Either BB works or it doesn’t.

Thanks to reader S.R. for recommending this plugin.

[update 2]
I installed Bad Behavior at about 2:30 pm. It’s now a little after eight, only five and half hours later. The banner at the bottom of the page shows over a hundred spams blocked. No posts I judge to be spams have shown up in the logs. I’m pretty happy about that.

[update 3]
Twenty-four hours later: 270+ spams blocked. Die, filthy lying thieving scum. Die slow.

Every now and then I get comments or trackbacks linking to blogs that excerpt a random bit of text from here, badly formated in a way that makes it clear the excerpting was done automatically by a somewhat clumsy script. Every entry is a random snippet posted by the same script. One of the most annoying things about this script is that it attributes the quote from my post to the person running the splog.

I’ve always wondered what the hell those were about, and whether or not I should keep them.

Today I found out. They’re splogs, spam blogs. I may also be the victim of blog scraping.

That’s it, then. No more. This stuff will be ruthlessly deleted whenever I find it.

My thanks to to Jeff Jarvis at Buzz Machine.