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I went to post this morning and discovered that, on the "create post" page, there was one of those annoying (and frequently difficult to get to work) "word verification" boxes. Therein lies a tale that might explain why Abbie of ERV (old and new) was locked out of her blog and the content disappeared for a time.

Clicking on a link entitled "Why do I have this?," I discovered that I had been declared an Enemy of the State ... er ... Blogger ... because "Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog."

Apparently, these robots can, on their own, decide to either "disable" your blog or, presumably if you are a lesser criminal like me, to demand that you dance ... er ... go through word verification.

I was "given" a chance to request a "review" by an actual person and am now redirected to a page that helpfully states:

Thanks for the vote of confidence.

Please be patient while I say your automated spam detection sucks.

Now, I have been blogging frequently about Expelled and, naturally, linking frequently to the NCSE site Expelled Exposed. That might explain why I was deemed a criminal. But Abbie posts much less frequently than I do and didn't link to Expelled Exposed nearly as often as I have. There is a much more disturbing possibility though. On that Blogger answer page, it notes:

If the automated spam detection takes into account people finding the blog "objectionable," there is a potential for manipulation by people opposed not to spam but to truth. Now who do we know like that who might also suffer from a certain lack of morality?

As you might guess, I've backed up my blog before airing this. You might find it interesting how I did it. If you bring up a month's archive and then right click on the page, a list of options will come up, including "view source." Clicking on that brings up a Word Pad window with the html for the entire page, including your template. Click on "Edit" and choose "select all" and then, also on "Edit," click "Copy" (or press "Control" and "C") and you've saved the page's html to your clipboard. Paste that into a blank page of any word processor you use and save that. This has the advantage of saving the html, with all the links, so you can easily recreate your content at any time. I was able to leisurely save two and a half years of blogging in less than an hour.
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