A week or so ago it was brought to my attention that this weblog Four Starters.com is not reachable by users of the Firefox 3 browser. It seems that Firefox3 uses the stopbadware.org blocklists and people who try to visit our site get to see this:

Stopbadware is designed to stop spammers and other evildoers online, but in doing so it is causing a lot of collateral damage and blocking a site such as ours which has been mostly spamfree for most of the time.
This is a situation where the cure is worse than the pain. An arbitrary and unmotivated verdict is being cast without our awareness and there is very little we can do about it. Kafka could not have written this as well and even though rules of due process have been greatly relaxed in the USA, we didn’t expect the same low standards to be applied to our website.

We have a number of issues with the stopbadware.org process:

1. We are blocked arbitrarily, in the reports posted on stopbadware.org not once does it mention which parts of our website were in question and what they were guilty of. Stopbadware lists Google as the reason we are blocked and Google says it gets the lists from Stopbadware, so we are in an infinite loop. Suppose I have a very big content filled site, how am I supposed to find the offending links without decent reports?
   And if those reports are a work in progress, how about not blocking sites until you have your operation in order? We think we have fixed the problem as far as Four Starters is concerned, but without detailed violation descriptions, we won’t know for sure. I have written a detailed complaint to the stopbadware Google Group.
2. Having fixed any violations we could find ourselves, we have asked our site to be reviewed for reinclusion but this has taken days already without any word. Getting on this blacklist seems extremely easy, but getting out is somewhat more difficult. We are annoyed that Four Starters is unreachable (our traffic is in the basement), but imagine that this is your business’s website that’s in the doghouse.
3. Blocking is also unilateral without notification to us (we had to hear it from people sending us the screenshot) and without possibility for appeal. Seeing as getting off the list is so difficult and slow, the possibility of appeal should reasonably be an option.
4. Blocking a site does not solve any real problem. For phishing sites it may be somewhat reasonable, but in our case the report does not even say that we host badware, no it says that we link to sites which may host badware. Blocking us on that ground seems like shooting a nuke at a butterfly.
   If people do not want to read our site, give them the choice. Firefox does no such thing and cedes the entire site to the spammers.
5. Lastly I do not recognize that badware is a problem, at least not for people who are visiting our site. Most people reading Four Starters have a Mac or Linux based system and/or are computer savvy enough never to go to the bad parts of the internet. So we are being punished because a large part of the internet is stupid. Again this does not strike me to be a sound principle to run a blacklisting operation.

Stopbadware tries to reach a noble goal but currently it is striking out too broadly and in doing so it is doing more harm than good. Furthermore it does this based on an authority which I do not recognize using a process which is broken. If arbitrarily gagging sites is what it takes to fight spam, then maybe it’s not worth it.

I hope that in the following days our ban is lifted and you can read what I have written here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 27th, 2008 at 22:08 and is filed under Blog, four starters.