Blog Downtime

As you may have noticed, the Catastrophe X blog has been unavailable for nearly the past week. Apparently Google's robots wrongly detected it as a spam blog and shut it down without question. I immediately filed an appeal and jumped through all the text message and image recognition hoops to prove that I am, indeed, mostly human. However, an actual person at Google had to review the blog before it could be brought back online, and that only happened today.

Now, I understand the trade-off between false positives and false negatives when detecting spam, and I don't take it personally that this blog was marked as spam. However, it is completely unacceptable for the blog to have been immediately shut down, and for my appeal to have taken six days to process. Owners of blogs detected as spam should have their blogs read-only locked, and should have a couple of days to prove that they are human and file an appeal before the blog is taken offline. And when somebody does the human verification and files an appeal, it should be reviewed within hours, before the blog is taken offline. Just my two cents.

Bad, Google.