Showing posts with label reality check. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reality check. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Insult


This morning in my email was the following message:
Hello,

Your blog at: http://surgeonsblog.blogspot.com/ has been identified as a potential spam blog. To correct this, please request a review by filling out the form at [link deleted by me.]

Your blog will be deleted in 20 days if it isn't reviewed, and your readers will see a warning page during this time. After we receive your request, we'll review your blog and unlock it within two business days. Once we have reviewed and determined your blog is not spam, the blog will be unlocked and the message in your Blogger dashboard will no longer be displayed. If this blog doesn't belong to you, you don't have to do anything, and any other blogs you may have won't be affected.

We find spam by using an automated classifier. Automatic spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and occasionally a blog like yours is flagged incorrectly. We sincerely apologize for this error. By using this kind of system, however, we can dedicate more storage, bandwidth, and engineering resources to bloggers like you instead of to spammers. For more information, please see Blogger Help: http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42577

Thank you for your understanding and for your help with our spam-fighting efforts.

Sincerely,

The Blogger Team

P.S. Just one more reminder: Unless you request a review, your blog will be deleted in 20 days.
But the real insult was in following the link to explanations, finding this (emphasis mine):
As with many powerful tools, blogging services can be both used and abused. The ease of creating and updating webpages with Blogger has made it particularly prone to a form of behavior known as link spamming. Blogs engaged in this behavior are called spam blogs, and can be recognized by their irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text, along with a large number of links, usually all pointing to a single site

So much for my assertions that this blog has been of value, or, at least, once was.

I should add that in order to perform any action in posting, I now have to do a word verification. The distortion of the letters is so extreme that I can barely read them. So you might not actually be seeing this. I await the judgment of the blogger overlords. Meanwhile, I'll have the words in my brain:
irrelevant, repetitive, nonsensical. Alas, it is I.

Monday, February 18, 2008

Good One!

My political rants have gotten a mixture of comments, as well they should. Clicking on the name of one of my commenters led to the discovery of the following cartoon. Although it doesn't reflect any plans of mine, at least for now, it's definitely worth sharing:


Sampler

Moving this post to the head of the list, I present a recently expanded sampling of what this blog has been about. Occasional rant aside, i...