We spent the night down in Coconut Grove to go to her office Christmas party, then had a late breakfast on Key Biscayne, and took a leisurely drive back up to Boca Raton on A1A, all the way from South Beach, and just got back. Work things are heating up as well, so blogging might be light.

Me, too.

For some reason, the blacklist was not allowing anyone to comment, because it thought that they were commenting too many times in too short a period of time, even if it was only one comment.

I’ve bypassed that section of the code for now–I don’t have time to figure out why it was screwing up.

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.

Ever since the hurricane, my phone and DSL lines have been flaky.

Surprisingly, the DSL has been more reliable than voice (as I type this, I have no dial tone (whooops…) take that back, I have dial tone with static, but I’m confident that based on tonight’s experience, I will soon, once again, have no dial tone.

The internet comes on and off as well, sometimes with a bright red traffic signal on the DSL modem, and other times simply not working. Sometimes it comes back with no prompting, others I have to log into the router and manually reconnect.

This is all a long way of saying that life is frustrating as hell right now, and that if I’m not posting, you’ll know why. Bellsouth guaranfrickingtees me that they’ll have it fixed next Tuesday…