Benefits Of The New Dashboard Based Spam Review Request Option

The improved spam review option has been available, on our dashboards, for slightly less than 2 months. For all it's usefulness, it appears that some blog owners see the new option as just another bit of red tape, which prevents them from publishing their blog. We see suggestions in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken, periodically.

Can't you just submit my review request now, without making me wait another 2 days? Is my dashboard review request really necessary?

Unfortunately, the better the dashboard based spam review option works, the more this confusion should be expected.

Long ago, we had a "Deleted Blogs" link on the previous Blogger dashboard. That link, and the hidden list, were obscure - and explaining how to find the "Deleted Blogs" list was not a job for the weak or impatient. When a blog owner would post in the forums

Why was my blog deleted? I am not a spammer!!

we would typically reply, immediately, with the notorious Spam Appeal Guidelines - then later, cooperative blog owners would see

Your appeal is forwarded to Blogger Support ...

In order to speed up recovery of the less spammy blogs - and shorten the restore wait time for all deleted blogs, Blogger Engineering added the dashboard based "Restore" button. The new button serves two functions.

1. For blogs deleted by Blogger, that are marginally spammy, the blog owner can request an expedited review.
2. For blogs deleted by the owner, less than 90 days previously, the owner can easily restore his own blogs, as convenient.

The new button serves several groups of people, in various ways.

1. Owners of less spammy blogs benefit by expedited restore. When successful, they see their blogs possibly restored on that same day, without their spending any time in the forums.
2. Owners of marginally spammy blogs benefit by regular review and restore, from a shortened queue - since some blog owners will use the expedited queue.
3. Blogger Support can spend less time with the marginally spammy queue, and produce quicker turnaround - yet spend more time examining the truly spammy blogs.
4. Only the genuine spammers will not benefit from the new review queue.

This produces a Win - Win - Win - Loss (sorry, Spammie) scenario.

The blog owners who get their blogs back in a few hours probably won't post in the forums, and praise the improvement - they will be busy re publishing their newly recovered blogs. We may see more oblivious spammers, because Blogger Support will able to spend more time examining truly spammy blogs - which should encourage Blogger Engineering to tweak the automated spam classifier, into digging deeper into the Blogger Blogosphere. So we should expect to see more posts in the forums, for a while.

Why was my blog deleted? I am not a spammer!!

And, it's possible that not all deleted blogs will be listed by the "Deleted Blogs" wizard.

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