Earl World Was Locked

On Wednesday, I signed in to write a post and got the following warning:
"This blog has been locked by Blogger's spam-prevention robots. You will not be able to publish your posts...."

Wow...instant blogging withdrawal. Blogger provided a link to take you to an information screen for a locked blog. The information screen said I had to request a manual review of my blog in order to have it unlocked. Their manual review takes up to two business days. Great!

The only thing I can figure is that I was locked due to me leaving comments on several blogs. My comment spree was started by a local food blog. The Foodie Report had a post not too long ago saying their management is questioning the extent of the audience of their blog. They made a request to visit often and asked folks to post a comment as well. I like their blog (and I like getting comments here too), so I decided to help them out and leave at least one comment a day there or somewhere when I'm surfing around.

Rather than always putting in simple text comments, I included links in several of my comments made to various Blogger blogs. They were relevant links -- and I think each link was unique. It's actually more work to add html tags to include a link in a comment. Blogger's own comment box directions specifically mentions it's ok to use tags in your comments. Finally, every comment I made required "word verification" that is specifically used to prevent comment spamming. So what's up with that!?! I think they need to work on their spam filter criteria.

Finally today I was released. I received this note:
Hello,
Your blog has been reviewed, verified, and cleared for regular use so that it will no longer appear as potential spam. If you sign out of Blogger and sign back in again, you should be able to post as normal. Thanks for your patience, and we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.
Sincerely,
The Blogger Team


I'm still going to leave a comment a day when I'm reading various blogs. And thanks to all the folks who leave comments here. I know it takes some extra time, but they are much appreciated. If you're a Blogger user, I hope your blog doesn't get locked.