My Blog Was Locked!

(If you're reading this, my blog has been unlocked, but I want to share my thoughts about getting unexpectedly locked out.)

I just tried uploading a post and it didn't appear on my blog.  I logged into my Blogger account to see what was going on and found this message:

Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What's a spam blog?) Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive.

You won't be able to publish posts to your blog until one of our humans reviews it and verifies that it is not a spam blog. Please fill out the form below to get a review. We'll take a look at your blog and unlock it in less than a business day.

If we don't hear from you, though, we will remove your blog from Blog*Spot within a few weeks.

Find out more about how Blogger is fighting spam blogs.

I understand that Blogger wants to keep spammers from constantly filling up blogs but it seems like there is a better way than to totally shut-down a blog without warning.  Why not unlock posting again after filling out the form while they review the blog rather than a totally locking-down unsuspecting bloggers like me?

In some ways, this seems like a minor inconvenience, but in others it is more than that.  Imagine if this happened during a time when a major news event or political campaign was going on and the blog affected was playing a critical role in that process.  I'm not paying any money for Blogger, but sometimes the cost is still pretty high in terms of interruptions, time to post, etc.  The new version of Blogger (formerly known as Blogger Beta) seems to have fixed a lot of these problems, but now this comes along.  I'm not the only one to have been frustrated by these issues.

I understand Blogger's need to keep itself free from spammers, but this solution seems like a non-optimal one for dealing with this problem.  If I didn't check my blog after posting, I might not have known this was a problem for some time.  I wonder if anything like this ever happens over on WordPress or TypePad?