Comment Moderation Note Re: The Spam Queue
Posted on January 3, 2012 Posted by John Scalzi 10 Comments
In the past month my comment spam has increased exponentially, which makes it harder for me to go in and rescue the occasional comment from an actual human being that WordPress has, for reasons known only to it, decided are sufficiently spam-like to punt into the spam queue. So: If you tried to post a comment and it doesn’t show up automatically, if after a day (24 hours) it does not appear:
1. It probably went to the spam queue and was deleted (sorry);
2. If you feel like it try to repost it and if it doesn’t work, send me an e-mail and I’ll try to go in and retrieve it.
Note that most of the comments that don’t immediately show up go into the moderation queue; I get an e-mail about those and try to free them as quickly as possible. But once in a while, off to the spam queue they go. There does not seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. The ways of the WordPress spam filter are mysterious (although, to be fair, in general is does an excellent job).
Anyway, as always, please note that unless I have specifically told you otherwise, if your comment does not show up after you post it, it’s due to automatic filtering and not me hunching over the comment thread, moderating you ahead of time. Honestly, I don’t have the time for that. So in almost every case, if your post doesn’t show up immediately, don’t get paranoid. It is almost certainly not personal.
You’re not moderating us from the future? And here I was hoping maybe we could eventually convince you to actually write our comments for us ahead of time. That way, when we click on the comments we’d see what we thought about a particular post without having to do the actual thinking ourselves.
Oh well, there’s always Fox News.
Interesting, Charlie Stross quite recently posted that his blog’s comment spam had risen dramatically.
I don’t imagine it’s coincidence.
Twitter spam also seems to have had a sharp uptick lately, even for those of us who aren’t Internet Famous at all.
On the forum I moderate, not only has the spam increased, it’s gotten smarter. Occasionally the spam even makes posts that are on topic. I see a behind the scenes breeding program between spam and trolls and it’s scares me.
It’s not spam, it’s just The Internet, waking up.
My little blog has currently, since the installment of a particularly effective spam-fighting plugin a couple weeks ago, blocked 8,306 spam comments. I cannot even imagine what it’s like for the Akismet spam filtering servers these days.
For the curious who are able to install third-party plugins, I’m using Spam Free WordPress. I actually turned off Akismet and have only had one manually filed spam comment.
I thought the spam had fallen a bit. there was a time I’d log onto the blog and have forty, fifty squatting in the queue. recently it was none or two, three at most. But the last two days I opened up to find 49 and 12.
The battle continues.
One thing I have seen trigger a spam alert is words that appear inside other words. For instance, there is an economic theory about the state controlling the means of production that starts with the letters SO but are followed by letters that spell out the name of a prescription boner pill. that word always gets kicked into spam despite being part of the larger word having nothing to do with boners. I am sure there are others but thats just the one I remember now.
As stupid as that is you can still use the actual name of the pills by simply putting spaces between the letters like the spammer do.
Clarence Rutherford @ 7:54: letters SO but are followed by letters that spell out the name of a prescription boner pill. that word always gets kicked into spam
Is it sad that I read that and started sounding out words that started with “Sovia…” in my head? I think that’s sad.