Hot News about the Goat!
Dear Pingoat fans, lovers, haters, and so on. Recently, all of you have noticed some really strange changes around this orange goat.... Many of you got blacklisted without any explanation , other were whitelisted very fast, or we ignored your email, comments, or forum posts.
The reason it happened it's because like everyone, we are putting a lot of effort to maintain and improve our website since it was aquired.
So... before moving to the good part of the news, I am going to tell you how this pingoat really works.
There are two kinds of people out there, and we all know that:
a) good people
b) bad people
The good people, are the ones who have decent content, people who like to monetise their blogs (or not), and who add posts in their blogs on a constant basis. Life's good for them.
On the other hand, we have the bad guys (male and female) who are using all sorts of crappy software which generates thousands of keyword rich blogs which aren't really usefull to the humans. Not only the content it's crap, but many times, they get very good search engine ranks because of the highly optimised articles which are only machine generated content.
Also, these people use some sort of 24$ software which pings a lot of services. We hate that, no one wants to see the Goat dead because some lady wants her machine generated blog to be ranked #1 in google.
And that's why our friend Kailash invented the spam filter, along with the Splogspot.com website, where you can see a beautiful list with that kind of crap blogs.
The bad guys use certain english language patterns which simulate the natural way of building a blog, that's why most of your blogs trigger the spam filter. The spam filter cannot make a good difference from what is human and what is generated by machines (SPAM).
Let's get to the point because we want to tell you that we improved the service:
1) the bad guys won't be here anymore (the filter is more effective)
2) the good guys are able to whitelist their blogs using their own hand.
How's that....?
Well, if you see that "Hold it right there" message (I'm starting to hate it too, but it's cool, Kailash did a great job, and the phsychologic impact it's wonderful...
), you can simply submit a code into the image verification box, and you are whitelisted.
Because robots can't read images, they will fail to verify the code, and after three unsuccessfull attempts, they will be banned forever.
It's a good practice -- the good guys will be whitelisted automatically, and the bad guys will be banned forever.
On the other hand, if you can't see the code, because you may have problems with the eyesight, please drop us an email, or anything which might give us a notice about this problem. We will be happy to help you, and we will also implement an audio image verification system for people which cannot deschipher the code from the verification image.
When you are blacklisted... if you are blacklisted, go there on the main page, fill the fields with your blog's details, and then ping! If you are blacklisted, an image verification system will pop and if you submit the right code, you will be whitelisted automatically and then you can ping how much you want.
REMEMBER.
If the filter is not fully convinced that you are not a robot trying to guess the verification code, it might tell you that you are whitelisted, and then it will ask the confirmation code once again. It's no problem, submit it, and you're done!
"The message said if I don't insert the right code I will be blacklisted forever!!? This is something that my competitors could do against my business!" ... said someone
It's not like that, you can come back in 10 minutes and try again, so it's no problem with this issue.
One more thing....
The comments are back, but we really insist that you should not insert ANY links into your replies because they will be deleted. We are sorry for that, but the spam people are adding lots of spam comments stuffed with links , and we really don't have time to separate the bad comments from the good ones.
If you have a comment which involves a link, or a suggestion which might direct us to an URL, please open a new thread in our goat community and we will be happy to get there and read all the info.
Also, some people came on the forum and complained about the fact that we are increasing the number of members on our board by blacklisting your blogs just to have you there and report the issue. No, totally wrong, a comunity it's based on good emotions. No-one wants to have a community filled with people who began to hate the goat just because they were blacklisted, that's not a good friendly start, right?
Anyways, have fun with the goat, and if something happens, you have the forum, or the contact form.
Thank you for being with us, great job everyone!
The Goat's Friendly Shepherds!
