Someone should organize an international blogspot flagging day (all about flagging blogspot sites). We could pick a day, say, a saturday in September, then collectively cruise blogspot through the “next blog” button, flagging all the spam blogs that contain 10 links to a single site in every post, loaded up with keywords.
I’ve been spending a futile 30 minutes each night flagging spamblogs this week, and last night I hit a site I had previously flagged days earlier, and was kind of dismayed to see it still around clogging blogspot and google. I bet a movement of bloggers flagging obvious abuses at blogspot would work just like a “clean up your local park” day might.
A Whole Lotta Nothing 
I for one would gladly spend hours doing this—if I was convinced it would do any good. Blogger says the feature is for “objectionable content” and “vulgarity” and that flagged blogs “won’t be promoted on Blogger.com but will still be available on the web”.
Blogspot is over 50% spam at this point. They need a “flag as spam” button far more than one for vulgarity.
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Huh, maybe I read the flagging announcement wrong, or it was that I saw several people saying the flag this page feature was to root out spam blogs.
In cruisng blogspot for a while now, I’d say I hit spam blogs maybe 2 in 5 blogs and I’ve only found one obvious porn blog. I was surprised to see at least 7 or 8 in 10 blogs seems to be in english — I would have thought there’d be more in other languages.
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Maybe I spoke too soon – they’re apparently working to clean up spam, or at least the “next blog” spam.
This might make it hard for people to find any spam on Flag Day – I clicked through 20 different ones without finding a spam blog today. They’re doing something right…
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Hmm.. I posted a thread on Neowin asking more people to join the effort .. I spent an hour flagging the blogs today .. I found more that 60% of blogs are spam 😦 ..
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I’d participate! I also set aside time each evening to flag splogs found via Next Blog. I know the flagging is doing _some_ good because yesterday it took me a good 15 clicks before I found a splog. 15! Used to be like…2. 🙂
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Sounds like a great idea I’ll spend a day creating fake blogs that point to all the people who rank higher than me, you guys wil spend all day narcing on them, and their domains will get taken down. If you all get tired let me know where I can send the pizza and beer to keep you going …
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I spent half hour on Wednesday .. And it seems to be working ..The first spam blog I found was 17th one .. then 23rd .. I found 7 or 8 splogs in total half hour .. These photoblog are pain 😦 on a dial up ..
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With this cleanup happening, people are starting to spam blogs with links to blog archive sites, so that blacklists are filled with links to innocent blogs rather than genuine spam sites. I’ve been receiving spam links to several MT blogs today, as have a number of MT and WordPress bloggers (I use both, but it was my WP blog that was affected).
So, now that they find themselves kicked off Blogspot, they may be planning to get their own webspace and use MT. How better to prepare than to make any MT archive link look like spam?
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Sorry to rain on everyone’s parade (really), but I feel we should be careful about anything that in any way smells of censorship. I am truly surprised that more voices have not been raised against the flag feature. Perhaps because it is called a “flag,” and criticising it makes people feel unpatriotic?! More about this on my special blog on this particular topic.
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