Facebook throws up roadblock for Google-hosted blogs - ZDNet (blog)

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Facebook throws up roadblock for Google-hosted blogs - ZDNet (blog) Mar 12th 2012, 01:10 Facebook has started throwing a CAPTCHA prompt for all Google Blogger blog links. This means that when you want to post a blogspot.com link, or any link hosted by Google Blogger, you will be prompted to verify that you are indeed a human and not a bot. Try it yourself. Head over to Facebook and try posting a link to the Official Google blog. You will get a CAPTCHA prompt like the one in the screenshot above. To make matters worse, the "What's this?" link is broken in Facebook's "Security Check" window is broken. That means users who don't know what a CAPTCHA prompt is cannot easily find out. I'm told this is causing a lot of confusion for many Facebook users trying to share legitimate links. One can argue this problem is not as bad as the issue three months ago, when Facebook completely blocked Snopes.com for being spammy or unsafe, since if you type in the CAPTCHA correctly, you can still post the link in question. On the other hand, this prompt doesn't affect just one website: Blogger provides hosting for hundreds of thousands of websites. To give you a better idea of Blogger's size, its Alexa rank is 43. CNET's is 88 and ZDNet's is 1,093. Google bought the Blogger blog-publishing service in February 2003. Most of the blogs are hosted by Google at a blogspot.com subdomain. Up until May 2010, Blogger allowed users to publish blogs on other hosts, via FTP, and all such blogs that still exist are now hosted on Google's own servers, with their own custom URLs. Facebook has likely started doing this automatically because thousands of spam links are hosted by Google Blogger. Unfortunately, this is affecting legitimate websites, and of course thousands of spam links are not hosted on Google Blogger. I was first alerted about this issue by Joshua Brunson of The Bulldog Estate, which is hosted on by Google Blogger but has its own custom URL. Ironically, his website helps Facebook users by informing them of spam and scams proliferating on the social network. I expect that this is a mistake in the company's automatic system. I have contacted Facebook and will update you if I hear back. See also: This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters recommends: Donate to Wikileaks.

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