In my previous post, someone pointed out that I should flag the offending blogs. I hadn't previously been aware of this feature. But here's the interesting thing.

The blogs that are doing this (at least the few I've looked at) have no flag. Somehow, they've come up with a way to disable it. And it seems to me that that could be their undoing. Now all that Blogspot has to do is autosearches of all their blogs and see which ones' flags are disabled, and zap them.

Am I missing something here?

I may reenable blogspot comments later today, just to see if they've given up on me yet, but I hope that the folks are Blogspot are working this problem. I'm dismayed that I've not received a single response to several emails to their abuse address.

[Update a few minutes later]

Well, what I'm missing here is that there's no requirement to have a flag, and only the blogs that are using some variant on the out-of-the-box template seem to have them. For example, Arcturus doesn't have one. So I guess that won't work. I knew it was too easy to be true.

But that answers the question about flagging them...

I also note that when one goes to www.blogspot.com, there's no obvious place to report abuse, so if they don't respond to emails to abuse@blogspot.com, I've no idea how to report these things.

Once again, I recommend that serious bloggers get off of Blogspot.

[Update about 10:15 AM EST]

I've reenabled blogspot to comment and ping, and so far, so good. It may be that after I shut them down yesterday, they've gone off to greener pastures.

Once again, I recommend that serious bloggers get off of Blogspot.

Anything you would reccomend?

It's hard to make a general recommendation--it depends on one's budget and technical wherewithal. I'm hosting several domains on a shared server at Phatservers.net, but that's not for everyone. Similarly, a lot of bloggers use Hosting Matters, but again, you have to know what you're doing, or hire someone.

Maybe Typepad would be an easier transition for people used to blogspot. Of course, at some point, the Typepad people may start having the same problem with spammers. But it will probably be better, because it's not a free service that anyone can sign up for on the fly, as Blogspot is. The problem with Blogspot is that, like email, there's no cost to the spammers to pull this crap. As I said, if you're serious about blogging, you should be willing to pay something for it, and it keeps the riffraff out.

As I said, if you're serious about blogging, you should be willing to pay something for it, and it keeps the riffraff out.

Point taken. I wasn't asking for myself so much as others. I've got a hosted server at a local ISP - for me it's not the money that's been keeping me from moving to (say) Word Press but time.

Which is silly - six hours tops and I'd have the box actually running Apache and serving files. Perhaps I'm merely lazy and apathetic.

In my defense I've had zero problems with space4commerce and comment spam, and I use haloscan for comments and trackback.

(I apologize in advance for using Rand's bandwidth to advertise, but this is more of a public service announcement than an ad -- I'm not getting any money out of it.)

Anybody interested in moving to Munuviana, let me know. If your blog looks like a going concern (fairly regular updates, fairly decent history of posting), I'll nominate you and you're likely to be let in (our immigration policy is extremely flexible).

Go to http://munuviana.mu.nu to a get a feel for the general atmosphere of the community.

I am unflaggable! BUWAHAHAHAHAHA! ;^)

Is this message little enough to be one of... lost idea