Some of you might have noticed that when you attempt to post a comment, it seems to disappear into thin air.
Never fear. It’s just gotten stuck in my spam filter. I absolutely cannot figure out why. I’ve even simplified the filtering criteria, and I still get valid comments ending up in there from time to time.
Rest assured that I always wade through the muck in my spam filter before emptying it, and that I will find any valid comments that get temporarily lost in there. So if you have something sincere to say, please continue saying it.
And if you’re trying to sell porn, or iPods, or cut-rate vacations, or any other product with the intent of separating my readers from their money, your message will never see the light of day. So please, go away, and try to do something useful with your life. Thank you.
© 2010 by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg
Let me know if if you ever manage to get the message in your final paragraph to actually take…
To be honest, we all might be better off if some of my comments did get obliterated by your spam filter.
Sam: Will do!
BD: Yeah, but which ones?
If you’re using Akismet, anyone who is being blocked by it here may well be getting blocked elsewhere as well. I found I was getting blocked by a number of self-hosted WordPress sites so I asked one site owner to check her spam and lo and behold, my perfectly inoffensive and unspammy comment was there. This is the second time I’ve been blocked, so perhaps someone has just clicked “spam” by mistake. I’ve also had perfectly decent comments from regulars ending up among six pages of spam comments.
Indigo Jo: I’m using Akismet, so I wonder whether people who have been blocked elsewhere end up getting blocked here as a result.
There is one person who leaves great comments and they *always* end up in the spam filter. I’ve gone over some of her comments word for word, looking for what triggered the filter, and found nothing. If she was blocked on another site because she triggered something there, that might explain why she gets blocked on my blog as well.
I wonder whether WordPress offers some way around the problem. That would be great. Wading in spam is not fun, but in good conscience, I can’t leave my loyal readers to languish there unattended.
When I first started using WP (version 1.5, back in Feb 2005), the system had a habit of spamming comments even when they were posted by the site owner (pre-Akismet, based on much simpler criteria), and someone had to release a plugin to “never spam comments from the site owner”. Perhaps someone could release a plugin to do the same for other comments by named individuals (or maybe they already have – I suggest searching the WP plugins directory for “whitelist”).
I took a look at the WP plugins directory, and I don’t see anything that addresses this particular issue. There is a whitelist plug-in, but that appears to allow you to specify users whose comments won’t have to wait for moderation on moderated blogs. I only moderate first comments; after that, users are approved to have their comments appear. If they abuse the privilege, they end up in my spam criteria. So, since the system is automatically generating a whitelist, and comments from approved users are still going to spam, I don’t think that the whitelist plug-in would get around the problem. Bummer.
Hmmm…I’ll have to do some more looking into this. Meanwhile, I’ll keep rescuing decent comments before emptying the spam folder.