A Brief Outage...

While working on a couple of upcoming posts this morning, I was a little surprised to see an email, purporting to be from Google's Blogger team, telling me this blog had been removed. According to the email, it had been "flagged for review" because my content had "violated our SPAM policy".

Now, I'm no stranger to spam comments, and I've removed and replaced a couple of posts because they started getting increased volumes of traffic well outside what I would consider believable... I've also previously had a couple of posts flagged and suspended due to some sort of false flag caused (if I remember correctly) by Google's own bots... But the idea that the whole blog could be taken down as spam? That seemed a little far-fetched.

And yet, when I then tried to view the blog itself, I was presented with a message to the effect that the blog could not be found... And then I noticed my current drafts weren't saving... And then I couldn't access the back end of this blog at all.

Naturally, I clicked the link to request a review, and even the web page that initiates the process seemed to give me some cause for optimism... Apparently the very fact that I followed the link went some way toward proving this wasn't a spam blog. However, it said that the review would take place some time in the next two working days. This being a Sunday, it's not normally considered 'a working day'...

Yet, lo and behold, precisely 30 minutes later, I had a new email telling me the blog had been reinstated.

And then it occurred to me: the original email said the TransForm-A-Blog had been "flagged to us for review", the implication being that it had been deliberately flagged by a person. I mean... Wow. Nice.

In other news, I got a lot of photography done today, and got quite a way through several drafts, one of which is now scheduled for late this coming week, another might even go live tomorrow...

For the moment, I'll leave you with a hint about one of the upcoming posts...

...Something I would never have bought were it not for a massive price cut...

Blogger 'Fun'

When I got up this morning and checked my email, I found two notifications from Blogger in my email inbox. I always get quite excited when I receive a comment, because it's still quite a rare occurrence... But the subject line of the emails made my heart sink:

"Your post titled 'Robots in Disguise Rail Racer' has been deleted"

"Your post titled 'Cybertron Brakedown GTS' has been deleted"

According to each of these emails, it had been determined that these posts "violated our malware and viruses policy." and continued with the recommendation "We encourage you to review the full content of your blog posts to make sure that they are in line with our standards as additional violations could result in the termination of your blog."