Nexy reports that’s she’s been having problems leaving comments on “Alas” and other wordpress blogs. She’s not the only one; I’ve had similar reports from Jake Squid and Defenestrated.
It’s normal for comments to sometimes be put into moderation; when that happens, you should see a notice saying that the comment is in moderation. But what’s happening to some posters is that their comment just fails to appear, without any notice at all. When this happens, the most likely culprit is the Akismet spam-blocker, which is now automatically built into WordPress blogs.
If this has been happening to you a lot, you might want to go to the Akismet contact form to let them know you’re not spam.
If you think Akismet has mistaken a comment you left on “Alas’ for spam, please email to let me know immediately and I’ll try to rescue it. But it’s important to contact me quickly — I get over 400 spams a day, so I can only find yours while it’s near the top of the pile. “Akismet” is supposed to be learning software, so if I keep rescuing your comments and telling it that you’re not a spammer, eventually it should get the idea and stop mistaking your comments for spam.
If nothing else works, you can also email me a comment and I’ll post it for you.
* * *
Meanwhile, blogspot has been keeping me and (I suspect) many other people from posting comments — the word verification image isn’t loading (Nexy has a screenshot), and neither is the disabled access alternative verification. If you have a blogspot blog, you should consider turning word verification off.
(Of course, by the same token, I could turn Akismet off. For me, 400+ spam comments a day is enough so that I need a spamcatcher that’s genuinely effective at catching almost all the spam, and Akismet really is better than any other spamcatcher I’ve tried. But it’s my impression that I get more spam than many bloggers do.)
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On another thread, Defenestrated writes:
No, I keep making an ass of you – but it’s not intentional.
For some reason, the Akismet spam-blocker thinks you’re spam. I have no idea that your posts have been caught by Akismet until you mention it in comments; once you mention in comments that you’ve had posts disappear, I go into the Akismet folder and find and rescue your comments.
So that’s why your comments aren’t appearing until after you’ve publicly said “well, my comment has been eaten.” Sorry ’bout that.
I just opened BNN up to general commenting, with Akismet in place, and I see hundreds of spams a day now. (Up from basically none when we had required registration and moderated first post.)
My “solution” to the being-blocked problem was to stop linking my website(s) in my little name thingy there. Then it lets my comments through.
aha!
just testing…
400+ pieces of spam? Ouch. That’s got to suck.
I’m getting about 20 spams a day at feministcritics.org. The spam to my personal blog at cddaran.wordpress.com has fallen to nothing, as have search engine hits. (I duplicated the content at feministcritics, which does get the hits, so I’m guessing the search engines don’t show it at cddaran any more.) I conjecture that spammers use search engines to determine which blogs are popular.
I’ve been having problems posting at blogspot too. Nice to know they’re not just picking on me.
400+ spam comments a day . . . it’s my impression that I get more spam than many bloggers do
I have a very, very low-traffic blog that’s been up not quite two years. I routinely get over a thousand spams a day, and lately it’s been close to 2,000. Akismet gets virtually all of them, and sometimes puts a handful into moderation. Maybe 1/10 of 1% actually get onto the comments threads (where they are often the only comment!). I don’t know what its false-positive rate is because there are simply too many spams to review, but after reviewing the first few thousand and never finding a false positive, I finally stopped worrying about it.
Akismet is certainly a god-send (or is that “fate-send”, given the name?). But I’m shocked to hear you’re getting “only” a few hundred spams on a blog as visible and long-running as this.
I found that either akismet is very responsive to the, “Hey, I’m not spam you stupid fuckers!” email/form filling or that it takes clearing my comments twice to allow my comments through.
So, akismet hated me but now we’re all, like, best buds.
THAT’S what happened to my posts. lol
Regarding blogger and blogspot:
You can go to this Web site to find more information on issues with blogger comments.
Status of Blogger’s comments
One way to get around it is to just ignore the empty word-verification box and just press publish. When it comes up again, your message should still be there and hopefully the symbols will be also. Keep doing this a couple times and most of the time the word verification symbols should come up.
test comment from my pc.
I was getting a few hundred a day, just in the past week or so it’s gone up to about 1500 a day. Aksimet blocks 99.99% of them, and I have moderation on for anyone who I haven’t previously ok’ed to post and that catches the rest of them.
But, yes, what a pain.
You probably do get more spam than most blogs. At one point, I blogged about a list of spam words appearing in referrers I had blocked using .htaccess. Later on, I found that specific post attracted 99% of my spam. It was amazing. For better or worse, your blog discusses sexual topics, and you are going to attract a lot of spam bot.
Even just discussing knitting, I get a lot. To help keep the load down, I use spamkarma with the askismet plugin. Spamkarma rates the spam and just deletes a lot of it. It also gives positive karma point to people who have posted comments before. So, regulars are unlikely to be blocked.
If you add the akismet plugin, the borderline stuff is sent on the akismet. So, you still get the akismet function but don’t need to look at quite so much stuff. I also use badbehavior to keep the number of ‘bot off the site.
i got an email back from akismet advising me that the problem should be fixed now. apparently, he’s right. :)
Make spamming a capital offense. Engage the CIA in hunting down spammers around the world. We spend so much time defending ourselves against these dirt bags, I say no penalty is too harsh.
What Nick Kasoff said.
I don’t get spammed because of word verfication, but I’m getting tired of people winding up on my site after entering the search terms, “arab sex video”. All it does is lead them to an article I wrote on the Port of Seattle Police Department email scandal where emails and videos were sent denigrating male Arab-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, African-Americans and women of all races. Coming in second are people looking for sites, under “betsy ross” or “betsy ross problems” and I have no idea what that’s about.
Oh and then the former state AG(now in a new elected position) apparently technorati searches for his name every morning.
But spam, I am spared so far. It’s bad enough in email. More and more seems to get past the filter systems.