ATA (Ask the Admin) is a great site filled with fun technical support, news, and flash backs to what things were like back in the day. Here is the interesting part, in trying to submit them, Digg flagged them as spammer, or someone who has been reported as trying to game the system.

We have covered ATA in the past, and it is interesting that they have been flagged as spammers, if you look at their compete score, they are doing fine without Digg, but when does one person’s spam become another person’s interesting article.

While it is fun to question Digg on just about everything, and there are enough problems with Digg dropping login, dropping a lot of other things, submissions killed before they even get to a page, or buried on submission, it looks like the luster has gone from the show.

No wonder they want to sell, it has become a sad lonely place to be and looks like it is starting to suffer from the same issues that Tail Rank suffered from, lack of interest from the folks who built it. The owners have moved on, the car is still drivable, but does not know that it is just not as loved as it used to be. In all it is sad to see Digg going down hill, and doing some dang strange stuff.

The whole idea of user frustration is an issue here, we hate logging in 9 times just to check and see if there are any other URL’s that are being blocked. The sad part is that ATA does good stuff, they have a major audience, yet they are black listed at Digg as Spam, without a reason why. It could be that ATA was trying to game the system, but without really knowing why, and knowing what “users” deemed them to be spam we can only make some general inferences here.

1. They were deemed spam by a person who is barely computer literate
2. They were deemed spam by a power user who hates them for “insert reason here”
3. They really did try to game the system and this is a natural outcome of that (where is the response from ATA on that?)
4. The astrological signs for ATA are bad this month and Digg just didn’t want to deal with the karma

Yet one more reason for moving past Digg, and moving on to something else. No wonder they are for sale.