A reminder on comments moderation

Comments on this site are often automatically held for moderation, and appear after they are approved. Unfortunately, in a relatively small number of cases they get caught in the spam-comments filter. For reasons I’ve never been able to figure out, the software seems to take a dislike to certain commenters and throws most or all of their comments into the spam file, even though I never see anything visibly wrong with the content of the comments and even though the software is supposed to assign positive weight to being a previously approved commenter.

When it runs heavy, comment spam can amount to many hundreds of spams a day, which defeats the hope of sifting through them individually in search of legitimate comments, and means I just wind up deleting them in bulk. When the flow is light, as at the moment, I do try to make this effort, and sure enough two legitimate comments just showed up that had been wrongly marked as spam over the past day or two.

If your comment never posts, even though it’s innocuous or constructive, there’s a good chance this is why.

8 Comments

  • Thanks for the rundown, Walter. This is why I had to change my original username. Back when I was calling myself “FrEeViaggraMan,” my comments kept getting bumped.

  • Hey, that comment went right through!

  • You may laugh, but we do have one frequent commenter whose screen name looks just like a spam misspelling of a popular drug’s name. I’m afraid I probably marked several of his comments as spam before it sank in that he was a real person.

  • I’ve found the way to keep on top of it is to frequently check the spam filter so that it doesn’t get too burdensome. But then, that’s its own burden. I guess I have more free time than you!

  • If it didn’t necessitate any additional time-investment this might be a strong case for a www2.overlawyered DOT com unmoderated variety website. Us members of the “VRWC” (vast right-wing conspiracy) are generally pretty tolerant of political speech – even KOS and D.U.

  • I think Walter may have been referring to me. As most of my comments are insipid and don’t usually add much to the conversation, you might have been better off just letting them stay in the spam filter…

  • Now, if there was a way to sue the spam-filtering programmers…..

  • Now, if there was a way to sue the spam-filtering programmers…..

    … there’d be no spam filters at all!