Tuesday, April 1, 2008

or maybe not outsourcing

Got an email yesterday from blogger.com informing that their advanced spam detection AI had flagged this as a potential spamblog. I'm guessing that my nasty habit of putting href's in to sites for software and services I'm talking about was what did me in.

Any rate, the process appears to be thus:

1) you are accused by the bot
2) the account is locked out
3) you are sent an email giving you a link to click on to request that your blog be reviewed
4) wait until someone gets around to it (possibly up to 4 days)

I don't really blame blogger as spam is a huge, huge problem and spammers have proven to be resourceful enough to adapt to whatever antispam measures we come up with. I'm happy to not have to deal with the maintenance aspect of leaving a piece of PHP code flapping out in the wind (with a database behind it, even).

What's new is suddenly being at someone else's mercy.

It got me to noticing stuff like there's no (obvious) way to insert jump breaks into posts. Or wondering just exactly you go about backing up posts. Or categories to organize content.

Maybe this is getting back to the old idea of "I should probably be using a wiki". Either way, the concept of distributed/outsourced services isn't looking quite as hot to the control freak in me as it was on Saturday night.

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