Friday, August 01, 2008
Sound and fury, signifying possibly not much.
OK, this whole "spam blog" thing might just be stupid technology run amok after all, as Impolitical has also been bitten. Ah, well ... never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by idiotic administrators and bad programmers. That's what I always say.
Well, OK, I don't always say that.
YEAH, IT'S THE TECHNOLOGY. I'm seeing reports of numerous blogs from both sides of the spectrum having been boned this way. So let's just chalk it up to some idiot, summer intern programmer at Blogger and move on.
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11 comments:
CC, you're the techie here, but I've read around this morning about splog detection, and my blog has simply none of the characteristics that a splog-detector would be looking for. No multiple links to a single site; no machine generated text; no meaningless repetition; not even temporal posting regularity. I don't think it's paranoid to look for other reasons that this might have occurred. Until it starts happening to our friends on the Right, allow me my suppositions.
*adjusts tinfoil*
Just read your update, CC. Are there really disabled right-wing blogsites?
How would bots programmed to detect splogs make errors of this kind?
I shall treat your rule as a corrolary of Occam's Razor, and urge others to do so as well.
How would bots programmed to detect splogs make errors of this kind?
As someone who's busy these days designing a system with similar characteristics to splog detector-bots (i.e. a system with extensive automation to reward good users and hurt spammers), I can say pretty confidently that a small tweak in the variables used can make a huge and unpredictable difference in the result set.
It gets even worse when you add a new rule, or change your algorithm completely. I would suspect that's what's happening here.
Actually, I've just done what I should have done earlier--do a keyword search at Google Blogs. The paranoia appears to be politically interdenominational. Conservatives are screaming about a political clampdown; so are Catholic bloggers; and, last but not least, progressive bloggers.
They can't be out to get all of us. If so, there wouldn't be any "they" to do it. I probably should have hung fire on this one. But search the Google blogs with "spam blog google" for a bit of Saturday morning entertainment.
It's worse than I suspected. We don't know who 'they' are, do we? 'They' seem to have cleverly covered their tracks very well, haven't 'they'?
In fact, 'they' have rattled Dr Dawg to the point that he thinks that today (Friday) is Saturday.
I think we need more tinfoil.
Good grief. I should get out more.
I think it's the Chinese getting things "cleaned up" and ready for the Olympics.
Dr. Dawg, you mentioned Tibet just this past Monday. Plus you use haloscan. No live blogging of the Games riots for you!
"They can't be out to get all of us. If so, there wouldn't be any 'they' to do it."
that's what they want you to think....
KEvron
Ah, well ... never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by idiotic administrators and bad programmers.
Screw that. We need to continuously and relentlessly assume malice on the part of the neocons (not with this Blogger problem, though) and put them on the defensive.
Given the history, malice is the correct assumption with the neocons anyway.
Saturday morning and I still keep getting the error messages. ANything I can do to fix or do we have to wait on Blogger (God help us!)?
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