Sunday, June 26, 2022

Spam

On 18 June 2022, Blogger informed me that my list of numbers in a 2020 "Counting digits" blog had been flagged for review. The Blogger Team determined that it violated their guidelines (specifically, their Spam policy) and unpublished the URL. That was unfortunate because my post was a link in OEIS sequence A339752. They allowed me to update the content (so as to adhere to the guidelines) and republish, which would trigger a review. This was for me problematic, as I did not think that my numbers-list violated their guidelines. I decided to add an introduction:

On 7 October 2020, I wrote a little thing called Proportionality wherein I presented nine special solutions to OEIS sequence A339752: "Base-ten n containing a digit making its n-th appearance in the list of consecutive positive integers." The full sequence contains 662 terms. Wouldn't it be neat (I thought) if I showed those 662 terms in a manner where the digit making its n-th appearance stood out from the rest of the digits of the term.

I also added a postscript explaining what had happened and why I had previously published the numbers without an introduction, "leaving it to my audience to discover the sequence and marvel at the placement of the special digits". I then republished and waited.

Yesterday, Blogger informed me that "Counting digits" had been re-evaluated and reinstated. Did the introduction turn the spam into a now-understandable work of art? Did they realize that there was never any reason to unpublish the post in the first place? I did not know. At any rate, since the introduction and postscript are now documented herein, I decided to remove them from my original post. Bad mistake! As soon as I updated the blog I received an email repeating their original Spam claim and unpublishing the URL. This time I just deleted it.

Update: After a night's sleep, re-creation.

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