Earlier today, I received a message from Nick Bradbury. Apparently, you currently cannot visit his site through mine. BlogWare has a horrid Trackback management system wherein you can accidentally block domains you didn't mean to block. I quickly leaped into my account and looked for his domain. However, it didn't show up. I remember that Mitch emailed me hours earlier about a similar anomaly with his BlogWare-hosted blog. Something didn't smell right to either of us, but he had already lept through official support channels:

It was random tech support guy number five, didn't give a name. Well, along with you, Nick, and me, it seems like Blogebrity is on the “bad list” as well. I asked them why they were blocking Blogebrity from linking to me, and they told me this: “Apparently Blogebrity.com is blocked from linking to all of Blogware hosted sites due to spamming complaints (trackback and/or comment spam) by Blogware customers. I'm working with Tucows to try and get the block removed.” I've E-mailed Nick Douglas over there to let him know about that as well. Apparently this list isn't public, so there is no way to check and see unless you have a problem. Sounds like trackback and link spamfiltering taken a little too far.

The problem is that (a) we can't access the list to review it, (b) Blogebrity and Bradbury aren't spam, (c) if anybody is to block sites en masse, it should be done by filtering spammy keywords only. I have no way of easily telling my provider which sites are okay and which aren't – and I don't want to spend all day emailing them or filling out forms. I'm happy they're filtering, but I'm very disappointed in their approach. If anybody purposefully blocked Blogebrity or Bradbury, they were either (a) high, (b) hello, or (c) good evening.