Back on line -- finally...

On July 19th I was locked out of my blog because the Blogger spy robots flagged me as being a "spam blog" -- apparently providing links to sites that my readers might find interesting was too much for the Blogger robots to take. It has taken two whole weeks, but I (and, apparently, a great many other blogs) found this message when we tried to log into our sites --

August 02, 2008
You Are Not Spam
You knew that already, and now we do too. We have now restored all accounts that were mistakenly marked as spam yesterday. (See: Spam Fridays)

We want to offer our sincerest apologies to affected bloggers and their readers. We’ve tracked down the problem to a bug in our data processing code that locked blogs even when our algorithms concluded they were not spam. We are adding additional monitoring and process checks to ensure that bugs of this magnitude are caught before they can affect your data.

At Blogger, we strongly believe that you own and should control your posts and other data. We understand that you trust us to store and serve your blog, and incidents like this one are a betrayal of that trust. In the spirit of ensuring that you always have access to your data, we have been working on importing and exporting tools to make it easier to back up your posts. If you'd like a sneak peek at the Import / Export tool, you can try it out on Blogger in Draft.

Our restoration today was of all blogs that were mistakenly marked as spam due to Friday's bug. Because spam fighting inherently runs the risk of false positives, your blog may have been mis-classified as spam for other reasons. If you are still unable to post to your blog today you can request a review by clicking Request Unlock Review on your Dashboard.

Funny how they claim it was a one-day only mistake when I have waited two weeks for them to clear me of being labelled "spam." At any rate, let's hope this doesn't happen again.

Onward and upward, right?