Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Unintended Effects

One of the unintended effects of other OSR bloggers abandoning their blogs is that spammers are quick to adopt the former site for their own ends, complete with built-in followers.  Countdown To Game Time was a great little D&D blog that went off the air and has now been turned into a spammer blog for, i'm guessing, some sort of online poker website.

It's probably not just me, but i'm finding it difficult to remove myself from those blogs once one of the spammers takes over.  There's a bug in blogger that is preventing my from accessing my Manage Blogs feature so I can remove myself, a bug that I have politely mentioned to blogger but seems to have fallen on deaf ears.

I mention this because, in trying to remove several of these now-spammer blogs from my reading list, I unintentionally BLEW UP MY ENTIRE INTERNATIONAL BLOGGERS LIST.

My apologies to my many fellow-travellers.  If you would like me to re-add you to my "re-built" international bloggers list, please comment to this post with your blog address.

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EDIT: By International Bloggers, I mean non-Canadian bloggers.  Also, if there any Canadian DnD bloggers that are not on my Canadian list, please let me know.

19 comments:

The Happy Whisk said...

I'm sorry to read about this. It should be easy to remove ourselves from a blog, not like this.

Speaking of which, it's getting to be time for me to sort through my blogroll and ditch old ones.

What Tim does is he removes a blog from his roll if they haven't posted in two months. Or he aims to, sometimes he doesn't always get to it right away but those dead blogs are hard to remove from.

You know, now that I'm typing this very long comment to you, I think we went into our account through a different way to remove him from some dead blogs. But I can't remember for sure. I just remember it was a lot of steps and a hassle.

I'll ask him about it when he gets home and email you later about it.

Tenkar said...

I'm finding it impossibile to add blog to my blog list. Grrrrr!!!

Trey said...

Yeah, it's 3 that I followed that have succumbed to spammers in the past couple of weeks, with Countdown being the latest. I was having the same problem as Tenkar, but now it seems to be going ok.

Theodric the Obscure said...

This happened to Ann Scott's Medieval Mind, which just breaks my heart. All her stuff is still there at this point, but I've had to unsubscribe to get away from the daily spammings.

So...is Texas international for you? :-)

Tenkar said...

oh, re-add me at tenkarstavern.com ;)

Dennis Laffey said...

Add me to that international list. lordgwydion.blogspot.com

And now to see if I can get Countdown off my bloglist. Shame, I'd been hoping Bigby's Left Hand would come back some day.

Robert Morris said...

I've been managing my blog list mostly through Google Reader, so I haven't noticed these kinds of problems with Blogger. I'll definitely keep an eye on it, though, now that you bring it up. And if you don't have Back to the Keep on your blogroll, you can add it. I don't update as often as I'd like, but I'm still posting.

Paul said...

Yes, it's highly annoying. Geoffrey "Carcosa" Mckinney's blog got taken by some sort of audio-video spammer recently.

Bryce Lynch said...

Tenfootpole.org is in the house!

Brutorz Bill said...

I'm having the same problem. Very frustrating, I've contacted Blogger several times but no responses. Please Re-Add me. : )

George said...

Aaron - could you add me? I'm not sure if I was ever on the list in the first place, but you've commented on my blog a couple times so I figured I'd ask:
Underworldcleaningservice.blogspot.com.

I'm an American blogger. Mostly talk about B/X and OD&D topics.

Thanks!
George

Joshua said...

I'm having the same problem as Tenkar with blogger. Any new blogs I wish to add, I have to do through Google Friend Connect, which still puts them on my blogwatch for keeping track of new posts, but some of these blogs don't have a spot or button for that to click.

I dunno' if you were watching me, but if it's somewhat interesting, mine's http://hitting-dirtside.blogspot.com/. Occasional miniatures, sci-fi, but lately just fantasy and D&D stuff mostly.

Joshua said...

Oh, wait. I see one of my posts in the International Blogs section, ha! I don't think British Columbia is that foreign!

Theodric the Obscure said...

Thanks for adding me back in, Aaron. I'm quite glad you highlight the Canadian bloggers. I'm amazed at how many good blogs come out of the Great White North, and as one of your southern co-continentists, am apt to exhibit our tendency to forget.

Aaron E. Steele said...

Joshua said...
Oh, wait. I see one of my posts in the International Blogs section, ha! I don't think British Columbia is that foreign!

Fixed. Thanks for pointing that out.

Martin R. Thomas said...

Oh no! You had one of the best blog lists out there. I found a lot of blogs that I follow from your old list. Sorry that happened.

If you can add mine back to the international list, that'd be awesome. http://daddyrolleda1.blogspot.com/. Thanks!

I haven't noticed any problems with adding new blogs but I've mostly been doing it via google reader.

I wonder why so many bloggers stopped blogging? Kelvin Green mentioned over on m blog yesterday that there was a whole kerfuffle about it, but somehow I missed it.

-C said...

Don't forget about meeeeee. . .
Http://hackslashmaster.blogspot.com/

Keith Davies said...

Hi Aaron,

I'm in BC and have two RPG-based blogs.

http://www.kjd-imc.org/ is my more general one.

http://www.echelond20.org/ is where I'm working on Echelon d20, an OGL RPG framework.

Keith

Darth Luau said...

Hi Aaron

My name is Matthew and I am in Halifax NS. I run a blog called Fustians so Sublimely Bad

http://fustians.blogspot.com/

in which I talk about OSR, homebrew and the occasional movie.