For some unknown reason laughingsquid.com has been banned from Digg. I guess that would explain why I haven’t seen any traffic from Digg in a long time. I’m not sure which of Digg’s Terms of Use that we are allegedly in violation of. I don’t submit my own stories to Digg, so any abuse would not have come from our end.
Also, just to be clear, it’s not my account that was banned, but the source url laughingsquid.com. The error message says that it was reported by users, so maybe it’s being falsely reported as an abusive domain in order to get it banned.
Thanks to Mark for the heads-up on the Digg ban, I had no idea. Mark discovered that Digg was banning us when he tried to make a Digg submission for our post about the Muni Streetcar/SUV accident in San Francisco.
Maybe one of our friends at Digg could provide us with some specifics on this. I’m curious to know how long this ban has been in place.
I guess what is ironic is that we know that this post will not make it on Digg.
UPDATE 1: Sauce_ points out that the last time a Laughing Squid post has been successfully submitted to Digg was in May, so it appears that that ban has been in place for a few months. We have been a legitimate source on Digg since 2006 and over 30 of our posts have been promoted to their front page, but the last time one of our stories went popular was back in March of this year, which itself is quite odd.
UPDATE 2: Simon Phipps came up with a creative way to submit the story about laughingsquid.com’s Digg ban to Digg.
UPDATE 3: For the record I should add that I’m friends with many people that work for Digg, including Kevin and Jay, and I’ve been using Digg since the early days. They have an awesome team over there and I assume that they wouldn’t block us on purpose.
It could just be some kind of glitch in their system, but if it’s happening to me, then chances are other legitimate websites and blogs might also be banned, so I felt it was important to draw attention to the issue. Also aside from finding out what caused the ban, I would love to know why it has been in effect for 3 months.
UPDATE 4: Kevin Rose has removed the block.
We’re still trying to find out the original reason our domain was blocked.
UPDATE 5: Now that the ban has been lifted, Mark was able to make his orginal submission to Digg, which is what alerted him to the fact that Digg had banned us.
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
Huh, a search reveals that there hasn’t been a digg story pointing to LS.com since May. This is odd considering some of the love you two have had for each other in the past. Very Curious.
Curious things happening at Digg lately. First the unwanted redirections to the Digg pages from short links, and now this…
Maybe they’ve outsourced some core functionality… to MARS.
Fascinating – I’d love to know the rationale. I’ve posted your tweet on Digg – let’s see if we can get it voted up far enough to get an answer…
Ok, who is asleep at the wheel over there? Your site is very diggable, in fact…one of the few that i’ll actually digg these days. You do more for them than they probably do for you. Oy.
Looks like Kevin Rose fixed it… http://twitter.com/kevinrose/status/3119280668
Go Kevin. Only several thousand other legit websites to unban now…
digg is getting crazy to ban the websites every now and then.. I thought Digg is the trusted one..
Digg banned my user account with no warning or explanation. They provide no means of appealing these actions. It would be easy enough to get around this ban with another account but I just don’t bother with Digg anymore.
“Simon Phipps came up with a creative way to submit the story about laughingsquid.com’s Digg ban to Digg.”
Oh, VERY creative.
Digg is cutting edge; the edge of deletion from my feed list.
It is not important, it is imperative to use that delete button, when any companies – like Digg – show their true brown(shirt) colors. See also; the whole “malware” fiasco, with another gestapo company – to see the nefarious trend.
Don’t drink the Koolaid. The user has the power. Without you, their service vanishes, along with their banksta-profits.
Don’t agree with their “polices”? Hit delete!
Was there a reason given?
Not yet, we are still working on trying to find out what happened.
Nice, professional handling of the whole issue, Scott. One more reason to LOVE having you guys host my site!
This bites – and the average user doesn’t have your juice to get to the people in charge to get unbanned.
You must log in to post a comment.