To be honest, John, this doesn’t surprise me at all. For a while, it seemed as though you were writing posts solely to get on digg, and then you’d make posts about being on digg that would then get on digg. I’ll admit, I was starting to get annoyed, although I never did anything about it, but I definitely understand why people were burying your stories. Sorry

I checked their FAQ and I didn’t see anything about this. I guess there’s always Netscape?

This is from the FAQ:

Are blog posts okay to submit as stories on digg?

Blog stories are fine as long as the story is not plagiarized. However, if any URL within digg is consistently flagged as SPAM by the digg community, that URL will be blocked from submission.

It only take 10 bury votes to kill a story - even if that story received 1,000 Diggs. Bury enough stories from the sites you hate and you can get that site banned.

I’d say this stems from how digg users look upon blogs. I think there is a resentment from many of the digg users who may even have small time blogs but can never seem to get their blogs in digg. (just a guess)

I know that I actually kinda found it annoying how many times your blog was mentioned on digg… I don’t even know why I cared anyway, So I just subscribed to your rss feed and never thought about it again.

I agree with Richard. People’s jealousy probably killed you. But then again, you did rub it in, fuelling the fire. But I expect that from you. John Chow doesn’t eat humble pie! Live and learn.

Yes, those people are probably jealous with your posts always get dugg in front of the page. I am wondering if other news submit website does ban the URL?? It make me feel the traffic from google search is better.

With over 100000 visits a day, the jealous people are not hurting John at all.

When you can’t match the success the childish way is to attack.

I suppose I see both sides of the argument; however, it there’s a method to indicate that a URL is a SPAM url, there should also be a method to recognize it as not being SPAM.

I believe PhishTank takes a nice approach to this. Folks actually vote on the URL in question and the vote is what provides the status.

If Digg could improve their SPAM reporting to this kind of method, then fans of your site could spend time voting to make sure that your site is valid.

Not very democratic, is it? Sounds like you’ve been Digg-bombed!

I wouldn’t worry. I bet they unban you.

http://digg.com/tech_news/Banned_From_Digg

digg it!

Use another domain and link it to this domain

Steve - That’s pretty funny! LOL But I’m not really worry about it. If Digg unbans the URL, great. If not, then that’s fine too.

*BTW - Digg buried your submission already. I hope they don’t ban your account.

Did any of the alladvantage 2.0 stuff get on digg? I could see how that would be considered spam, since you were pushing a pyramid scheme.

It’s a shame, since you are constantly making quality posts.

In reply to the “Anonymous” post, I disagree. John, I feel like your stories are always original and insightful. You provide a look into many subjects that normally I wouldn’t see and I think that’s how it is for a lot of other people too. The idea that someone out there thinks that your posts are spamming digg is ridiculous! If they want to clean up digg so much then they should ban all diggs on the Wii and Playstation 3 because that is 90 percent of the posts on there.

Keep up the good work and don’t let the idiots get you down. They are upset because you have something going for you that most of them will never even come close to.

Do you get advertising bucks from hits when people view your website?

If so, and you self promote yourself constantly…then you are infact spamming.

Steve - Digg buried your submission already. I hope they don’t ban your account.

Paul - I believe someone did submit the first story I wrote on AGLOCO.

Matt $ - Thanks.

doyou - Yes this blog makes money from advertising. There is also no rule that says you can not submit your own stories. But to answer your questions, all the past dozen of so Diggs were done by readers.

The SPAM argument is ridiculous. The site was crowned by majority of Digg users. I understand that digg owners would not mind to see some new faces and this may be a way for them to shuffle their stack of cards. A complete ban because of several votes of non-confidence is an outrageous action, which needs to be reported as a violation of first amendment.

I just have to laugh at some of these whiners who’s lives center around the “blogoshpere”

To these idiots complaining about getting annoyed with you always getting dugg. Stop reading!

If strange peoples blogs (johnchow.com) getting traffic from a site you have no affiliation with (digg.com) is a troubling event in your life how do you even function in the real world? Do you even leave your house?

As for John “writing posts solely to get on digg” this is such a stupid comment I can’t believe any sane person would even post it, but what is John supposed to do? Deliberately write things that no one finds interesting so he doesn’t get dugg?

Damn damn damn. Not very good for you at all is it. Might it be partly because you were one of the best ‘Digg Whores’ ? I read digg whore from Tyler Cruz’s blog

If this site was spam, then it would not be as successful as it in fact is. The vast majority of John’s posts are entirely original and are not spam in any way, shape or form. The problem is that there are a group of people on Digg who are just haters and can’t stand that John’s blog is more successful than theirs.

To that I say, why hate when you can take notes?

However, John knows what he’s doing and…c’mon, you’re just throwing rocks at the bears, you idiot. Heheh…

so sorry to hear this, but i think they will unban soon.

if not we can start some new website called bannedfromdigg.com

they suspended my account haha (email below)

____________________

title: Suspended account

This email has been sent to inform the digg user attached to this email
that their account has been suspended. The reason for the suspension is
below:

Using a re-direct service to circumvent a blocked URL. However, we will
unban your account if you agree to not do this again.

–digg support

_____________________

i will agree not to do this again in order to get my account unsuspended, but i will also give them my thoughts on this ban :-\

btw john, if i could get your AIM that’d be great

lol what a pathetic rule….so if people start burying yahoo.com stories, digg will ban them?

that’s the problem with digg users and the net in general, too many people taking themselves too seriously

Methinks with the people you know, you could pretty easily start getting some mainstream sites banned… as a form of civil protest…

I left Digg a long time ago. That website is full of douchebags.

Keep up the good work, John… don’t let those self-absorbed pricks at Digg get you down. Your articles are continually relevant and filled with useful information; I’m hard-pressed to say thing same thing about Digg these days. Their site went downhill so fast. One minute it was decent, the next it was spammers and libertarians galore. The whole place is a fanboy-cesspool now, and you really shouldn’t care that they banned your site; it’s their loss, not yours.

Keep rocking this site and TTZ until the wheels fall off, my good man. And drop me a line if you’re ever looking for a kick-ass developer.

Well, I replied to them with my thoughts and told them that I would not violate their TOS again. For anyone interested here is what I had to say:

_____________________________________

First off, I will agree not to use a re-direct to circumvent a blocked URL.

Secondly I would just like to lay out my thoughts on this issue…

Banning URLs solely based on digg users’ opinions is not the best way to prevent spam sites from making their way onto digg. If I understand this correctly, if users bury stories as spam enough times from the same URL, the URL will be blocked - no questions asked.. Isn’t the whole point of digg to display the content that users find useful and interesting? Just because certain stories from JohnChow.com are off topic and of little value to the majority of digg users, who is to say that none of his posts are? If one post is spam, it will be buried as spam and not displayed on the homepage. This accomplishes what digg sets out to accomplish by filtering out spam posts and only displaying submissions that the digg community finds useful. I will be one to admit that not all of the posts on JohnChow.com are digg-worthy- not because it is bad content, but because the only people it may bear any interest to is readers of JohnChow’s blog (which has many different subject matters, some which are more appealing to the digg community than others). This is where the conflict lies in this certain case; viewers of his blog are submitting content that is not valuable to the majority of digg readers and many users are burying these submissions as “spam” while many of the blog’s readers are digging the stories with blind loyalty to john chow(i can’t imagine they would digg some of these submissions if they were not from johnchow.com). In short, I think that john chow’s site should not be blocked because although there is the occasional unnecessary digg submission from his site, a lot of his content is good, rich, and useful content that the digg community should see. Banning sites is a good idea to prevent spam and complaints in certain cases, but I don’t believe much is being accomplished by banning JohnChow.com. In my opinion, the digg moderators should block sites at their discretion(not the user’s) and ensure themselves that a site in question is truly useless to the digg community and that it is a spam site before blocking it.

_________________________________________

The AGLOCO is probably what did it, as someone already said.

I say we get together and get some other sites banned just for the fuck of it! Let’s start with Tech Crunch and Engadget, just to show how retarded this rule is. Make an example out of the biggest blogs, that should prove a point!

Digg is losing it.

John’s articles are in-depth and relevant. Spam articles have misleading titles, links and content.

There is nothing wrong with promoting good articles. For digg to remain relevant, they need to get off this path.

johnchow: you blog about your earning after get dugg in the front page. So some people might feel jealous with that.

I can see why they do this so people don’t just submit a site to get some hits, but in the case of your situation i believe the articles that get dugg are worth being dugg. Its not like your submitting your own storys. Apparently some people do have it out for you. If they they refuse the change it just find a loophole. Get another domain and do some kind of url fowarding if someone feels the article should be dugg.

I agree with Victor. In fact, I’ve stopped reading Digg for about a month. It’s simply too easy to game the system for your own evil purposes (that have nothing to do with finding the best news/stories on the web.)

It seems someone already said my opinion, but on the odd chance they don’t unban your url, you seem to be doing very well regardless. Yes, digg will send a shit load of visitors to you, but you already have a shit load, so its not too big a deal. Good luck John Chow, as a reader of your blog i will putting my opinion of this situation to my 5 visitors a day in favor of your side.

Sorry to hear you got banned dude. Dont take it to heart, your articles are worthy of being on Digg. I guess people just got sick of seeing your articles there though and started to “bury” you.

John,

You need to demonstrate how stupid this is. Post something trying to get egagenet or hackaday banned. I will bury any site you ask me to.

Your loyal Viking,
Lawrence

Although I have only been a Digg user for a couple of months it seems as if lately it is getting absolutely out of control. Every day there is at least 50 Apple stories on the front page (I’m an Apple fan, but still…), and there are tons of spam stories that get thousands of Diggs.

I’m on the side that suspects there is a large group of people that play the system.

[...] About a month or so ago I read an article on the blog of Johnchow.com. Since then I have been a daily subscriber to his posts. It wasn’t just the daily helpful and entertaining articles that were posted, but even more so, he has accomplished what I would like to do. Make a living off running a website. Recently in his post “Banned From Digg” I was informed he was, in fact, banned from having his URL submitted into the Digg news cue. [...]

Won’t be long before these voting sites have to bring in outside observers to make sure everything’s on the up and up - sorta like third world elections!

hmm … DiggRecount.com lol

It probably won’t be looked upon by Digg very well, but you could always digg it under one of your other domains that redirects to your blogs page

John Chow is the BOMB! banning a bomb does not detonate it, The Web space is bigger that Digg, let’s fly on. MySpace and Youtube never needed a Digg to be big web player.

An elephant does not need prayer to be big, “BIGNESS” is its heritage. The talented and creative content of this blog cannot be “killed” by the Digg’s assassins’ hate bullets!

Very sad! Come and blog on my blog now! haha

I can see a digg backlash happening…

Who needs digg anyway

Basically this is a huge hole in digg.com, now if you wanted to you could knock out any site you wanted from digg.com. Sort of the reverse way of digging up sites. I would think digg will eventually change this once the abuse happens.

John don’t worry your blog is great you have a great following. You will no doubt be back on digg.

@dean - I was just gonna suggest that. John could easily game digg, but in the reverse way - get a list full of sites banned with a couple of simple posts, ordering his subscribing troops (that would be us) to *click*.

I’ve just emailed digg with my opinion on how banning JC is ridiculous.

I think it’s time someone created a Web 2.0 Blog site that focused directly on blog posts, rather than forums and hardware releases. Something of a mixture between Digg, Technorati, and Slashdot, where the people vote, but there are numerous moderators watch the real spam and hate clicks.

Response to some of you: There’s no reason to start a war at Digg for one site being banned. Don’t make examples. It’s not making you any better than those that got John banned. Move on to something better.

Sorry to hear that John - don’t let them get you down.

Hopefully your getting banned from Digg will spark a bunch of blog publicity, softening the blow to your traffic growth!

Lawrence,
You are a true friend!
———————————————-
You need to demonstrate how stupid this is. Post something trying to get egagenet or hackaday banned. I will bury any site you ask me to.

Your loyal Viking,
Lawrence .
———————————————–

John,
That’s what I called Yin & Yang.
Batman also got his enemies. Now as a good blogger (you!), when you did a good job, you have to alert with the bad-ger (bad-blogger)!

Never mind John, you still have a dozen of Robin behind you….! Yup, it’s me and the rest of your friend here.

Keep it up!
I believe there is a group of people outside there which they think the 2nd (digg) must release a.s.a.p. (new site similar like digg)
And maybe they will come up with the best offer or forfeit all the (silly) rules like Digg did to you just now.
After that, the site will hot like Digg.

Do you ever think of that?

Someone Dugg my blog post about your banning. Then the submission got buried… Does that mean I’m next?

It seems kind of scary that a determined minority of Digg users can have a site banned from Digg.

Then again, we do not know how many buries plus angry emails Digg received about you!

The Digg Spam rule seems v flawed to me. How can Digg justify identifying something as spam that receives such a large number of diggs? I think the number of burys/mark as spam it takes to bury/ban a URL should be proportional to the number of Diggs. Also, they should have some kind of manual reveiw process so that stuff that has been incorrectly marked as Spam (it would be clear to most people that your blog is not spam) can be appealed against. Otherwise people could easily sabotage websites and get quality information sources banned.

I found your site from Digg and has been a loyal reader since then. Your posts are original and fun to read, Digg is making a mistake to ban you.
I am sad to see a few people can game Digg in this way.

Fu#k digg…

I never use digg, i use relevant sites that have
content, and digg is not one of them, only site i MAYBE SOMETIMES !!! use i reddit and it’s tied with programming.

Digg is burred…