Last night, I wrote an article on the Microsoft Word patent story, and submitted it to Digg.  I got this error message:

Now, I’ve never gotten any notice from Digg that I’d broken any of their rules, no warning, nothing about what behavior I was doing that they found objectionable (and even going to the Digg pages for the previous articles, I saw no flags that anything was wrong).  But apparently this unknown wrongdoing was so bad and so persistent that my blog has been banned from Digg…again without telling me.

OK, I thought, we can resolve this like reasonable people.  Contact support, ask for an explanation, what’s the problem, how can we fix this.  That was yesterday.

It’s now a day later, and no reply.  No “Here’s what is wrong with your articles”.  No “Let me look into this and get back to you”.  Not even a “Hey, man, we’re Digg, we’re bigg, you’re not digg and not bigg and we can do what we want”.

So here I am, tried and convicted of charges I knew nothing about, and can’t even find out what the problem is.

I have gotten some advice from friends about ways around this.  Get people to write about my articles and submit them.  Change the domain (which would be easy, my gadgetdon.com domain is aliased with domesticatedarcades.com and eamontales.com, so a simple config.php edit and it’s a whole new blog).  But at best, that would be a short term solution, because my lack of any knowledge of what violations I’ve supposedly made would probably be repeated.

So instead, I’m going to work within the system, and get a response from Digg. Except from my web searches, it seems that a key part of the “system” is raising a fuss so Digg gets pressured into actually looking into the situation.  Well, I can do that.  If any of my loyal readers knows anyone at Digg, or knows anyone who knows anyone at Digg, or knows anyone who knows anyone who knows anyone at Digg, I’d appreciate the help.

And that’s the way it is, on the Digg Lockout, Day Two, Gadgetmania Under Attack.  Back to you, Chett.