BlogWare Censorship?
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.
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4 Comments
Nick Douglas
January 3rd, 2006
at 10:38pm
Kyle and I had hoped you were being wicked and blocking us.
Mitch Keeler
January 4th, 2006
at 9:15am
I'd be happy if Blogware just turned this whole new system off and went back to whatever they were doing before. It sure beats trying to think of all the places that might have linked to me and mentioned me and seeing if they are blocked from doing so again.
Kim Phelan
January 4th, 2006
at 9:29am
Hi Chris, Kim Phelan, product manager from Blogware here.
I'd love to tell you all that we have a new system that blocks trackbacks, but…we had a human adding to the trackback list over the holidays to get rid of a large number of bad trackbacks and they were overzealous.
We are conducting some cleanups at this point to make sure that blogware hosted blogs are not blocked (I suspect it will be sorted in the next day or so), but if you notice any please notify your retailer and we will make sure it gets rectified. Sorry for the confusion :(. My mantra today is “the road to hell is paved by good intentions”
As for the new trackback system, that is due in February, and details will be shared through documentation and release notes. It won't be shocking or inaccurate like our humans…
Iggy
January 4th, 2006
at 9:09pm
Remember the issue I brought up several months ago in regards to not being able to access your site using a link from my Blogware blog hosted by Lockergnome? I've seen this issue when trying to access more than one Blogware site from mine. And with IE7 under Vista the other day I was getting a 403 error when trying to visit any Blogware blog. I had to refresh every time to get the site to display. The findings you've posted finally shed some light on issues I've seen for some time. It would seem a proactive approach has gone awry.