Mystery in the Blogs

Bloggers is doing strange things in my blog. I’ve used this platform since 2012 and recently I noticed they’ve changed the font size on older posts, presumably to save bandwidth. They also dumped a bunch of short comments into my spam folder. I noticed this because in the past I’ve always kept just ten comments in that folder (Repeat offenders I want to remember) and when I’d notice an eleventh I’d know I accidentally sent a good comment there that was meant to go through to public viewing. Last week when I opened my dashboard I had over a hundred comments in the Spam folder and I was almost afraid to open it and see what had grown overnight. 

For them to by-pass the normal path of first going into the 'Waiting Moderation' file for me to manually decide their fate had never happened before so I expected Bloggers had added a new feature, an auto-bot and it threw a bunch of x-rated comments in that file or the guy who plagued older bloggers with his  “I hate Baby Boomers” comments got out of internet jail and was back sending his nasty-ass crap. Or maybe the woman from India who wants to improve our sex lives with a special herb to help our mates grow their penis sizes was hoping one day I'll accidentally send her ads through for public viewing. Finally, I opened the folder and found mostly my own comments like, “LOL” or “So true”----stuff like that and all of it over a year old. (A bandwidth pruning.) So I deleted them and thought that would be the end of it. It wasn’t. 

A week later a few more old and short comments showed up in my Spam folder plus a longer one from an “administrator”(or someone posing as one) written two days earlier who commented that my title didn’t match the content in a particular post. How it got into the Spam folder without being in the 'Waiting Moderation' folder would be a mystery if not for the fact that long ago and faraway I used to be an administrator on a website with a message board, chat room and blog community and I had the power to do all kinds of things on the backside of that place. One of my jobs was pruning older threads when I wasn’t deleting inappropriate topics or monitoring fights between members in case one or both stepped over the line and I needed to put them in internet jail for a couple of days to cool down. I just never thought a place like Bloggers---as big as they must be---would have humans pruning or moderators. Even back when I was doing that kind of work, pruning could be done automatically but I talked my boss into letting me do it in my spare time because mass pruning would have dumped too many still useful-to-our-members topics.

I’ve never had a knack for naming my posts or anything creative for that matter. My husband could. He named most of the art pieces I did for college art shows and all the photographs we entered in contests way back when I stalked little kids with my camera and he stalked wildlife with his. He even named my sister-in-law’s hair salon. Knowing how often editors change titles of articles and books it never bothered me much that I don’t have the skill to name my posts. But if my posts start getting pruned for not having titles that match the content, then I’m going to have learn at the ripe old age of dirt.

Of course there’s the very real possibility that I moved that "Admin" comment to the Spam folder and I’m having short term memory problems and don't have the brain cells to remember dong it and that a real human isn’t messing with me. 

I tried clicking on that commentor’s profile but it took me to a message that read, “The Blogger profile you requested cannot be displayed.” People do that when they have an invitation-only blog. It's like knocking on the door of an old speak-easy. Someone would open a little window in the door and ask you who sent you before admitting you in. I doubt real administrator for Bloggers would have a profile like that. It’s a mystery.

It's also a mystery to ponder why if I did move his/her comment to the Spam folder why would I have done that. I don't make a practice out of not publishing comments that are critical of something I've written. (Case in point, read the comments on the wedding dress post where I was chastised for body shaming the bride.) In fact when I write about certain topics I'm prepared for a little push back. Conflict can is good from time to time. It has the potential to make us grow if all parties involved stays on point and don't disintegrate into name calling which on the website mentioned up above was the tipping point for time outs in internet jail. (Internet jail, if you haven't figured it out by now, is just using a person's IP number to lock them out from getting on a website for set length of time. They can still communicate with the administrators but protesting your time out, just gets you a longer one.)

If I had published the comment I would have replied that sometimes I purposely come up with titles that don't match the content like if the topic contains sexual, money or religious matters. Long time bloggers know better than to put certain words in the title line or first paragraphs because the internet crawlers are looking there for the spammers to dump their stuff in the comment sections. That was not the case with that particular post title and content but I'm just sayin' it's a better excuse than saying I screwed up. ©

 

Added this morning: Is anyone else getting notices from Mailchimp wanting you to buy "additional credits?" I've been on their free plan to notify subscribers but this morning none are getting the notices. I have no clue what "additional credits" are. When I go to their website directly there is no mention of 'credits'.