Initially, we decided to kill Blizg, because it's being overrun with spam entries and we don't have the resources to clean it up.
We've gotten quite a response to the "Blizg will be dead and gone" message, though, so we're trying to find a better solution. The site will still die, but it may be resurrected later (under a different name) once we're able to refocus our efforts.
Thanks for your interest. If you have any suggestions or thoughts, feel free to share them.
Cheers, Brandon
I kind of guessed that would probably be the reason. It's a shame it had to come to this. It is a great site and one of the best of it's kind. It sickens me to think that the spammers have won. I loved the idea they came up with for "members" to vote for blogs, but I think it failed for a number of reasons.
1. Once listed on Blizg, bloggers did't feel the necessity to log into Blizg on a more than periodical basis. Hence the people "assessing" the submission list were mostly new and didn't understand the voting system. 2. People were probably worried that if they did vote for blog removal then the spammers might get hold of their details. (and we all know how much we love "comment spam".) 3. I don't think a lot of people grasped the voting system. They seemed to think it was a popularity contest, rather than a content-filtering system. 4. Sometimes spammers are deliberately vague in their descriptions, making them difficult to detect. There are also a good chunk of entries being written in foreign languages. 5. I guess some people didn't feel it was their responsibility.
From my own experience, the content filtering process was a little long and tedious as you couldn't do multiple removals in one go. Every time you clicked on the "x" you got taken to an acknowledgement page. If it were possible (somehow) to be able to highlight a page of removals in one go, rather than singly then I think that would go a long way to making the process more user-friendly.
Hopefully the new incarnation will be better, bolder and spam-proof!
