Friday, August 1, 2008

Mad Priest says...pass the word

All is well with the inimitable Mad Priest, but he has asked the blogging community to pass along a troll problem. Hat tip to Grandmère Mimi, who is helping him spread the news. And now, in his own words:

"OCICBW... got attacked by a particularly vicious troll last night. It was so bad I had to close down the comments overnight.

He seems to have got his revenge by reporting me as a spam blog to Blogger and they have blocked my blog. I have asked for reinstatement but it's taking up to a week to sort out at the moment.

Would you please notify people of this on your blog and tell them to put it on their blogs. I don't want them thinking I've done a runner or been disappeared by the Church Police.

Jonathan"


I went for my usual wee hours laugh last night, and he wisely reminded all of us to avoid feeding the trolls. I'm not sure whether that would have helped much in this situation, but it does help keep the blood pressure down!

(A practical update at 1:45 p.m. EDT: I did a bit of checking on what a "spam blog" is. It seems there are essentially two types (with different names). One big no-no is to create meaningless posts to direct traffic to other sites...essentially to bring up hit and visitor counts for advertising stats and such. There can be issues of blogs sending out malicious spyware, containing spam on posts, you name it. I think the first description is what was reported as an (obviously incorrect) offense, and it does appear they do a temporary shutdown before investigation. But really, no original content from Mad Priest? Oh, please!)

3 comments:

June Butler said...

Thanks for posting this, Lynn.

James said...

Thanks for the information, Lynn. I dind't know there were spam blogs! I'm such a newbie to all of this.

Anonymous said...

My site is blocked. As is Fr. Terry's and Mark Harris' I think "sitemeter" may be the common denominator. Hope blogger gets this worked out, as it is very frustrating.