Blogger.com: sayonara if you say so

A few weeks ago, as I scanned my email Spam folder with my finger poised to click the 'delete all' link, I noticed an email from blogger.com*, the site that I use to manage this blog. It said that their robots had determined that my blog was a "spam blog". Further, it said that if I didn't click the supplied link and request an "unlock review", my blog would be deleted in 20 days and that until then, my readers would see a warning on my blog. Gosh, thought I, lucky I spotted that, or my blog would've been deleted!

I clicked the link. Broken. No messages in my dashboard control panel thing. I published some posts, but the promised warning did not appear. It seemed like a phantom email, or as if the robots had changed their minds about me in the meantime. I tried clicking around blogger's help pages, but there was nothing relevant, and there is no way to contact a human at blogger (when you eventually find a 'contact us' link, and start feeling hopeful, you are dismayed to discover that it has been disabled, and redirects back to the help pages). There are no people steering this ship**.

A couple of weeks later, in my control panel, a warning appeared:

This blog has been locked due to possible Blogger Terms of Service violations. You may not publish new posts until your blog is reviewed and unlocked***.

This blog will be deleted within 20 days unless you request a review [ followed by a link to request the unlock review ]

I clicked the link, and was taken to the following page where I was asked to enter a 'captcha':

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

Your readers are seeing a warning page until one of our humans reviews it and verifies that it is not a spam blog. Please fill out the form below to get a review. We'll take a look at your blog and unlock it in less than two working days.

OK, fair enough, I thought: a computer made a mistake and a person will soon set it right in less than 2 working days. I think you can probably guess how the rest of the story goes from here: A couple of weeks went by, but the message persisted. After that, it was replaced by the original message (though no email this time) asking me to unlock my blog or lose it within 20 days, and promising that they would review it within 2 days. I went through the procedure again. This evening, a couple of weeks later, it happened again.

OK, the unsupervised robots running blogger.com want to delete my blog. Fine, effing let 'em, I'll use another service. I'm not going to let myself be bullied by a badly-written computer algorithm. Sayonara if you don't want me, though I have a sneaking suspicion that it's just an empty threat, and that their blog-deletion system is probably broken too. I guess I'll find out in 20 days.

[ * It's ironic that an email from blogger.com (who are owned by Google) accusing me of spam would end up in my Gmail spam folder ]

[ ** If a human who works for blogger.com ever actually sees this message, please leave a comment - with proof! - and I will post a photo of me eating my shorts ]

[ *** The fact that you're reading this post proves the statement is untrue ]