When I was making the last post, I noticed something that was not there before - a word verification for posting. It was a rude shock for me - like a surcharge in a formerly surcharge free ATM. Turns out, the great Google bots think that this is a spam blog. Guys, this is not a spam blog! I have a spam blog - but this is not it.

Your blog requires word verification

Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What's a spam blog?) Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive.

Luckily there was an option to say that this blog is not spam. Needless to say, I used that option, and they sent out real humans to test my site. Before long, I was cleared of all wrong doings :-)

We received your unlock request on April 5, 2007. On behalf of the robots, we apologize for locking your non-spam blog. Please be patient while we take a look at your blog and verify that it is not spam.

All jokes aside, I appreciate the fact that the Blogger team is working hard to get rid of the spam blogs in blogger. Blogger is just infected with those. A side effect of this is that I cannot comment on other people's blog using my blog's address(http://binnyva.blogspot.com/) as the URL. Akismet thinks that since I use a blogger site, my comment must be spam.

Just a friendly reminder to the guys using Akismet Plugin - its great for blocking spam - I use it myself. But there is quite a few instance of false positives - ie. legitimate comments marked as spam. So make sure you check the spam folder often. False negatives I can stand - but not false positives. That's bad.