August 06, 2008

Update: I am not a spam

It seems like ages (actually about 10 days) when I last updated my blog. Well a series of unfortunate events unsettled my internet presence.

First it was the Google spam bot which identified my blog as a splog and locked it. It said if not proven otherwise they were going to delete this blog. It could be the bot or some people may have reported it as so.

I panicked first and tried to contact blogger.com. They only had an automated process of reporting that it is not a spam blog and said it will take them minimum 2 days to review it by a service personnel. After two days there was no update from them so even I created a mirror of this blog in case I lose this space.

In the midst of all these another shocking thing happened. The harddisk of my HP business notebook crashed. Luckily I had bought an external harddisk and have 80% of my data in backup. As far I reckon I have lost some important mail archives, updates of last month's work and some important bookmarks among other things. I don't have another PC here (mine is back in Dhaka) so I was disconnected. The notebook's warranty period is over so replacing it here will cost much time and money. An expert said it may be the harddisk or the controller, in case of later it would take much time to replace.

I am trying to get a new notebook. But now I face another challenge. All the notebooks sold here have German language version of OS pre-installed (most of the offers have Windows Vista) and comes with German keyboard. I need to buy the Full English version of the OS (Windows Vista) which will cost me extra 300 Euro. A mere upgrade (about 100 Euro) will not change the language.

Another options to get it from outside Germany, but that will take some time. So lets see if any breakthrough happens in the meantime. For now I am checking emails from cybercafes.

Today I am delighted to see that my blog has been unlocked. And it seems its not the only one affected. There are confusions all around and conspiracy theories are being circulated.

I only wish this bad patch is over soon.

Update: Blogger admits-
We want to offer our sincerest apologies to affected bloggers and their readers. We’ve tracked down the problem to a bug in our data processing code that locked blogs even when our algorithms concluded they were not spam.

We have now restored all accounts that were mistakenly marked as spam.

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