Seen at Luminous Landscape and passed along here:

… Mike Johnston has been locked out of his blog site by rampaging anti-spam robots [but is] alive and well, so below is the latest word from Mike and how to find him…

As of about last Thursday, Blogger’s Spam-Fighting Robots… put The Online Photographer on lockdown, mistaking it for a “spam blog.” Evidently we triggered the robots’ excessively fuzzy recognition systems somehow.

Solution? There is none. You can’t get through to humans at Blogger, evidently by design (it’s a free service, after all). I’ve submitted a “review request” and now I get to…wait. And wait. Three days and counting, so far, and I’m told it could be as much as a WEEK before I’m let into the house again. In the meantime, the site will look like it’s frozen in amber, and there’s no way for me to even tell people what’s wrong.

So, to pass the time, I burned the midnight oil over the weekend and built an entirely NEW “Online Photographer,” using TypePad. Why TypePad? Because TypePad offers a little thing called “Customer Support.” Very Web 2.0.

Our new address will eventually be theonlinephotographer.com. If that doesn’t work for you right away, you may need to try http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com. The new site is looking pretty rough still, but I’m working on it. Please come over and have a look around, and let me know what you think.

When they let me in again over at Blogger, I’ll post a pointer. Until then, informing people can only be done by word of mouth. So if you can help spread the news around, please do, and many thanks. [The Luminous Landscape – What’s New]

The Online Photographer is on my regular “must read” list.

Hearing this story makes me a bit less inclined to let Blogger be my permanent host for my site when it moves – I’m getting more inclined towards using my hosting company’s WordPress and Gallery option.
—–