Yesterday evening the gremlins were partying on Squidoo.

When I was updating a couple of lenses yesterday afternoon (UK time about 4 hours ahead of EST), it seemed that Squidoo was barely crawling and so I gave up. I don’t have the patience to wait several minutes for a page to load.

Then yesterday evening, around 10pm BST (British Summer Time), 6pm EST, I wanted to check the lens rank update which should have been done a few hours earlier. The Squidoo server was down. I went on to the Squidoo forum and others confirmed they couldn’t access Squidoo.

Bearing in mind the time in the USA, early evening or early afternoon depending on the time zone, this must have been hugely frustrating for Squids trying to make lenses or update them.

This morning, Squidoo was back online but there was a new problem, affecting a lot of lensmasters. As I usually do, I went to the Squidoo forum soon after switching on my computer and there were complaints from several well-respected Squids saying their accounts had been locked and they had received emails from Squidoo. They were told their lenses broke the terms of service and their accounts would be deleted in 30 days. They could, however, send an  email to a specific address asking for a hand review which it seems many of them have done.

It gets worse…

Their accounts were already deleted, they couldn’t access them at all. They hadn’t got their 30 days to stop it happening!

Because of the number of people affected, it’s obvious that there’s a gremlin in the system. It seems an over-sensitive ‘abuse’ filter is responsible for false positives so prompting sending out all the emails and shutting down accounts. They’re working on it and hopefully it will be fixed soon. One person has already been told his account can be reinstated as soon as the problems are solved.

It’s causing a lot of worry and distress for great lensmasters who have invested an enormous amount of time and effort into writing excellent lenses that comply with Squidoo’s terms of Service. Let’s hope it’s fixed very quickly.

7.7.2010 UPDATE

As usual, Squidoo responded to concern among Squids and sorted out the problems the day after I wrote this post. All of the lenses and accounts that had been erroneously caught by the spam filter were reinstated.