Posts Removed from Feedster?
Feedster runs one of the search boxes on this weblog. When I’ve used it lately, my results indicate some of the posts from this weblog have been removed from Feedster as spam or at the author’s request. I don’t remember asking the good folks at Feedster to remove any of this blog’s content from their search engine, so I’m not sure what’s happening. I need to remember to ping them about it when I have more time to deal with the problem.
(I hate my schedule. I hate not being able to take the time to deal with this right away.)
Addendum 5/10: Scott Johnson, one of the Feedster gods, let me bug him with this problem. It turns out my feed was labeled as spam. I can’t stop laughing about that–er, not that there was a mix-up with Feedster (I *heart* Feedster!), but that my feed was labeled as spam. Although it’s probably quite appropriate to think of this as nothing more than spam, some people think of it as useless dribble, which is a tad better than spam. I think I’m going to blame the spam labeling problem on my penpal.
Anyway, it should be better soon. Thank you, Scott!
May 9th, 2005 at 10:04 pm
At the risk of stating the obvious:
1. Who is considered the author? The post you gave as an example was a cite of a Wired article, and a quote from it. Could Wired have made such a request? You also cited beSpacific as bringing this to your attention; could such a request have originated there? It might be that a looser definition of author than the owner of the page in question could apply.
2. How do they authenticate author requests? Do they make any effort to make sure that a request identifying itself as being from the author claims to be from the actual author, and actually is who they claim to be?
3. How is SPAM identified? Is there any sort of plausibility check, or could an anonymous e-mail to a robot trigger this?
4. How is SPAM defined? It doesn’t look to me like the articles in question could match a reasonable definition of SPAM.
5. Is there some other way this could happen than SPAM or author request as claimed? If so, what? Why? and so on.
6. Do they keep any kind of audit trail so they could figure out, after the fact, why a particular article was removed? (I would expect this.)
7. Is there a reinstatement procedure so you could undo cybervandalism? A confirmation message so you would be notified of an article being removed (so you could reinstate it if appropriate)?
May 10th, 2005 at 4:38 pm
Heya J. Spencer Love,
The author, in this case, is the author of the feed. I already claimed this feed in Feedster, so Feedster should know it’s my feed.
I’m not sure how spam is identified. When I chatted with Scott Johnson this afternoon about the feed problems, I didn’t ask about how it identifies spam or an audit trail.
The reinstatement procedure I followed is bugging Scott. Sometimes the problems I find are bigger problems in Feedster. Sometimes it’s just that Feedster picks on me. ; ) There’s a reason why I’m an unofficial bug tester for many services.