Monday, 20 July 2009

When is spam not spam? When it's As Gaeilge ...

Last Thursday morning, shortly after The Report had been released and our bloggers were preparing to comment, we received the following message from Blogger:

"Your blog at: http://www.progressive-economy.ie/ has been identified as a potential spam blog. To correct this, please request a review by filling out this form. Your blog will be deleted in 20 days if it isn't reviewed, and your readers will see a warning page during this time. After we receive your request, we'll review your blog and unlock it within two business days."

The e-mail included a link to a page informing us that:

"spam blogs [...] can be recognized by their irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text, along with a large number of links, usually all pointing to a single site"

After some head-scratching - not to mention several frantic e-mails requesting that the site be unlocked so we could continue blogging The Report - we realised what the problem was: Sli Eile's first post on The Report was entitled Bord Snip Nua = Gearr siar-agus-doigh. And Blogger's robots, not programmed to recognise Irish, immediately flagged PE as spam ....

Thankfully, Blogger responded to our pleas and unlocked the site within a couple of hours ...

1 comment:

Slí Eile said...

Yet another example of global capitalism (!) - like the Holiday inn 'Expect no surprises'. Standardise, quantify and submit to the market! They call it 'perfect competition' in the textbooks and it gives us 'natural unemployment'