Yep it happens like clockwork, Blogger feeds are again polluting Planet Geospatial. But it isn’t just Planet Geospatial. I got the same spamming in my RSS aggregator (FeedDemon).
I’ve been telling everyone that the new Planet Geospatial built on SimplePie will resolve the problems I’ve been having, but it gets spammed by Blogger too. I’ve finally come to the conclusion that the problem isn’t SimplePie or the current Universal Feed Parser (though the new SimplePie based PlanetGS is really nice for other reasons), but Blogger itself. Plus, it doesn’t matter if you use the new “beta” Blogger version or the older version.
So what is the best solution? Having people use Feedburner doesn’t work, the new */rss.xml feed does the same thing and even the latest feed parsers have the problem. As much as I liked reading up on all of Paul Ramsey’s posts from the past 2 years (I’m not picking on you Paul, you just got lucky I guess), this should probably stop one way or another. I’ve been ignoring it because I don’t really use Planet GS as my primary blog source, but I see that many of you do and I’m reading you loud and clear. You’d all rather have a cleaner Planet GS page (without all that non-standard blogger html code that shows up) without any of these feeds. Now is the time to speak up as to how you feel. I don’t want to be the gatekeeper of who gets in or gets kicked out of Planet GS, but I think the Blogger issue has come to a head.
Plus there are some great free blogging platforms that run rings around Blogger and don’t cause these problem. (If you’d all just move over to Wordpress.com this would resolve itself).
26 responses so far ↓
1
anon
// Nov 2, 2006 at 8:21 pm
I’ll be honest, I do find the blogger entries annoying for both their spamming and their having all that weird html code in them. Very hard to read and I usually ignore them.
2
Morten
// Nov 2, 2006 at 8:50 pm
It would be nice if images and URLs were preserved in the post. You don’t really realize theres a link or an image before you open the original post.
OK the spam are annoying, but hey its not like its happening everyday, and once you realize that if Poul Ramseys last post is outdated, you can just ignore the rest of them.
3
Steven Citron-Pousty
// Nov 2, 2006 at 10:50 pm
Down with blogger - down with blogger!
Especially when WP.com can import your blogger posts and comments and does domain hosting as well…
4
Chad
// Nov 3, 2006 at 4:25 am
Have to agree.. there are better, free blogging sites out there. Blogger posts just do nothing but make a mess most the time.
Or maybe someone sets up their own blog site for GIS bloggers to register and use..
5
Allan Doyle
// Nov 3, 2006 at 7:06 am
I’d hate to miss the good stuff that does appear on some of the blogger sites, but maybe this is time for tough love. I’m really kind of on the fence about it, though. When it happens I just ignore it and move on. But it does have the effect of pushing potentially good blog posts off the bottom of the feed. So I guess If I have to miss something it might as well be the blogger sites. And, as has been said, they have the choice of moving.
6
Brian Flood
// Nov 3, 2006 at 7:43 am
+1 on Allen comment, it pushes potentially good posts off the list. plus its annoying
cheers
brian
7
Dave
// Nov 3, 2006 at 8:55 am
I’m for the tough love - Punt the blogger feeds as they are very annoying. Instead of wasting a lot of your time trying to fix this issue, just spend 20 minutes making up a “Why we don’t aggregate Blogger Feeds” page, with links to the WordPress sign-up page.
Dave
8
David Davis
// Nov 3, 2006 at 8:58 am
Get rid of them. I’ve unsubscribed to a bunch of Blogger feeds in FeedBandit because they kept resetting.
Just this morning there were 20 new posts from Anything Geospatial and in reality there was only one. What a pain in the ass if you ask me.
9
PHL
// Nov 3, 2006 at 9:07 am
Blow them out of there. Nothing is more fustrating when you want to go read the feed on Planet Geospatial and find a years worth of posts by one blog.
10
Lefty
// Nov 3, 2006 at 9:38 am
Ubikan did it to me just this morning. Freaking unbelieveable. I’m unsubscribing from every Blogger feed, this shouldn’t be happening in 2006.
11
Brian Timoney
// Nov 3, 2006 at 10:32 am
James:
In economics-speak, the “switching costs” need to be imposed on those who choose to use a platform that is harming the utility of a public good.
And since you’re too nice a guy to say it outright, I will: Planet Geospatial is the de facto aggregator for the GIS community. If you want in, you need to follow very basic, sensible rules. If your libertarian sensibilities are offended by being told you can’t use a certain platform, well, good luck with your traffic numbers…
Brian
12
Chad
// Nov 3, 2006 at 10:39 am
If you are using feedburner already.. then there isn’t “that much” harm in switching where you blog from as the feedburner URL will remain the same.
And the old blog will have a pointer to the new location as well. (heck, could even lead to an increase in readers.. did for me.)
13
James Fee
// Nov 3, 2006 at 10:57 am
Frankly I’m surprised no one has come to the defense of the Blogger crowd. Maybe this is just so annoying to everyone that it should be done.
14
Adena Schutzberg
// Nov 3, 2006 at 11:30 am
As a loyal reader of PlantGS I agree it’s time for tough love. I’ll raise one more question: What about those “Daily links” posts from DIGG? Should those stay?
15
James Fee
// Nov 3, 2006 at 11:34 am
Well those DIGG links from Glenn and there isn’t much I can do about it. I take the whole feed or nothing (unless the blog offers me a GIS feed, minus the off topic stuff).
16
James Fee
// Nov 3, 2006 at 11:52 am
Here are the blogs we are talking about:
Anything Geospatial
ArcDex [GIS2.0]
The ArcPad Team Blog
Batchgeocode
Bull’s rambles
CarbonCloud
Catography
GIS Matters
ESRI Wisconsin User Group
EVS-Islands
FANTOM PLANET
GIS CAD Interoperability
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) GeoBlog
Geography 2.0:Virtual Globes
Google Earth Enterprise Blog
Graphics, Culture, and Bad Grammar
Interactive Earth
Let’s Push Things Forward
Map, GIS News Blog for UK, Europe and World
mapz: a gis librarian
GFOSS - Free Software GIS at your fingertips
Paul Ramsey
Rise and Shout
SQL for Geographers
Shock’s News Network
Surveying, Mapping and GIS
The Confused Life
Topology Errors
Ubikcan
17
James Fee
// Nov 3, 2006 at 11:56 am
Morton: The reason that I strip out all images is because it causes problems with the layout of the web page and slows the loading of the page down. They used to be there, but most people including me prefer them removed.
I also strip out every HTML tag except for p and br. I do this again for the formating. It it very hard to close these tags when I’m only showing the first 250 words of a post. What usually happens is that the entries at the end become bold italic because of these tags not being closed. I removed the urls because I think people should visit these sites. Bloggers took the time to write them and there will be more information than just the brief snippet that I’m showing on PGS.
18
Frank
// Nov 3, 2006 at 12:00 pm
What I don’t like about AnyGeo.com is that it hijacks the address bar. Visit http://www.anygeo.com/ and then click on an external link. You’ll see that you are still stuck with Glenn’s url. This means people can’t bookmark any of the sites he links to and I’m sure causes other problems with traffic.
Glenn is a good guy so I don’t want to seem like I’m picking on him, but it is very annoying. I end up visiting http://gisuser.blogspot.com which solves the problem, but AnyGeo.com is much easier to type.
19
Bull_UK
// Nov 3, 2006 at 2:02 pm
Well I do see your point and have been annoyed myself by the issue, but I havent seen my site do it, are you sure its a blogger problem and not just certain blogger.com users messing up thier settings? I would really hate to swap hosts as I’m used to blogger and lazy.
20
ManifoldUser
// Nov 3, 2006 at 3:44 pm
Oh no, not again! Blogger SPAM on Planet Geospatial.
21
Morten
// Nov 4, 2006 at 1:45 am
OK, I shift side… It definitely starts to get a bit annoying now.
22
matt m
// Nov 4, 2006 at 8:15 am
I am in the process of migrating my blog, the only problem is every other platform I have tried doesn’t allow me to take comments because of spam.
It makes me wonder if it’s related to some of their data migrations, but there is no reason to change the ids in the feeds- no reason!
I say disable blogger until the new beta goes production. It doesn’t bother me in my reader, but I can see where it would be a problem for aggregators…
23
James Fee
// Nov 5, 2006 at 5:38 pm
OK this is what I’ll do. I’ve looked at the logs and not every Blogger Blog spams. So if you feel like your blog isn’t spamming, then don’t bother changing.
When a Blogger blog spams PGS more than once (I’ll give the benefit of the doubt on all for one spam session), I’ll remove the feed. I think that is fair for everyone.
24
Bull_UK
// Nov 5, 2006 at 5:47 pm
Thanks James that is very fair, /me waits for blogger to bite him in the a** and spam
25
Dave Smith
// Nov 5, 2006 at 10:32 pm
Hey, James… not sure that it’s anything I am doing that’s odd or unusual that would be causing it - thought a month or two back, the Blogger server was having some issues for me, so it might have been their own techies monkeying around with things…
I think us Blogger users would generally be profoundly happy to gain any insight on how to avoid this in the future (other than moving the entire blog or other labor-intensive solutions…)
26
James Fee
// Nov 6, 2006 at 6:03 am
Believe me, I’ve been trying to figure this out for over a year. I’ve emailed Google and used a test blog to see if there is anything that sets this off. It seems to random. There are some blogger blogs that never spam and I can’t for the life of me figure out what they are doing different than those that do.
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