Digg Bans Laughing Squid For 3 Months Without Warning or Specific Reason

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.

UPDATE 6: After taking over as CEO, Kevin Rose announced that all previously banned domains will be unbanned. Bravo!