The Real Blogger Status

THis month, we have several reports in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue from owners who make backup blogs. Why was my blog deleted, by Blogger, as spam? Some blog owners innocently create multiple blogs, to back up their main blog. Unfortunately, having multiple blogs with the same content may make the blogs look like a spam blog farm - and Blogger detects and deletes spam blog farms.

This week, we're seeing a small flood of reports about abuse / malware classifications, involving various blogs. Some blogs are being classified as an apparently intensified effort to block a long recognised malware source - and others because of a newly detected problem. For a while, we've been noting problem reports discussing blogs with gadgets provided by "abu-farhan". Some hijacks would lead to simple spam displays (of possibly objectionable content), while others led to active malware distribution. The latter, in turn, generated more problem reports here - by people reporting their blogs now under the control of other people, who were not the original blog owners. This week, we see reports that Google has taken action against the "abu-farhan" domain . Blogger now appears to be actively classifying blogs, which contain accessories provided from "abu-farhan", as malicious content hosts - pending review, on a blog by blog basis. Along ...

This month, we're seeing reports in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , about problems uploading pictures (images, photos) to our blogs. The monolithic advice, provided by Blogger Use Draft Blogger! suggests that Blogger Engineering knows about the problem, and has a quick fix in their beta testing environment, Blogger In Draft. Some blog owners have found this to be effective - as a short term solution . Not everybody, however, finds all Blogger released fixes to be consistently effective. Many times, this is because very few people control their own computers.

I've been studying spam, in Blogger blogs, for over 5 years . This year, we've seen improvement in the automated spam classification process, implied by a noticeable reduction in spam review requests overall - and in a reduction of false positive classifications . During the past few months, blogs requested for review are 2 or 3 times more likely to be confirmed as legitimate spam blogs (true positives), compared to this time last year.

Comment moderation, and comment notification, have long been optional features of Blogger Commenting. The sequence of comment moderation email, and comment notification email, was simple. If comment moderation was selected, moderation email was sent to all blog administrators. Any one administrator could then select to Publish, or to Reject, a given comment. If comment moderation was not selected, each comment was simply Published, immediately. If comment notification was selected, notification email was sent to all recipient email addresses, when any comment was published. All blog administrators could Delete any comment, after it was published, at their discretion. When the new comment moderation system was provided, in 2010, comment moderation changed. As the comment filters became trained, some comments were automatically rejected - and sent to the Spam queue - and that is where the current problem starts.

This week, we're seeing some reports from a few blog owners who recently received a disturbing email message, mentioning their blogs and adult advertisements. I received an email stating I have adult content on my blog, and that a new policy will cause certain blogs to be deleted. Is my blog vulnerable to deletion, under this new policy? Like many spammers, these blog owners may be asking for a whitelisting of their blog - which is something that Blogger just won't provide .

Earlier this week, we noted an increased level of activity in reports about blogs locked as suspected spam hosts, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken . Upon review of the increased volume of spam referrals, with the majority of the cases found to be spurious, Blogger Support provided advice, about a new reason for deleted blogs . Yesterday, our malware detection system began receiving reports of malicious content on some blogs. While the blog content on many of these blog may be malware-free, 3rd party widgets on these blogs may contain malware. When a blog is locked for hosting malicious third party gadgets, the blog will be present in the dashboard "Deleted blogs" list - and should be unlocked, on the spot, using the "Restore" option in the list.

We see reports, from time to time, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , about blogs which people can't read, from their computers. One of my readers claims that I have a virus on my blog. He provided the following information: AVG anti-virus detected the following threat on the site: File Name: www.mydomain.com/favicon.ico Threatname: Exploit Black Hole Exploit Kit How do I fix this? Similar to the many reports that we process here, about spurious spam classification , the above report is frequently determined to be a false positive. An anti-virus alert, even if a false positive, is generally not as simple to resolve as a spurious Blogger spam classification, though.

Recently, a few bloggers have seen the return of an old favourite (not) Google Error We're sorry ... ... but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now. The general thought is that Google just changed some settings, and they need to change them back. Now . In reality, the situation isn't nearly so simple. The problem doesn't just involve settings. Hackers are increasingly inventive , so Google servers do behaviour and signature analysis of all incoming network traffic. As the hackers get more inventive, the analysis has to be more picky, which makes analysis prone to false positives . Then changing software on our computers makes for still more problems. When you see the error, it's possible that some basic diagnostic information might make it possible for Blogger Support to troubleshoot the problem . Browser. Internet connection. Location - geograph...