There have been several people recently who have been caught by the spam filter for spamming even though they weren’t doing so. If this happens to you, then the spam filter might also retroactively remove all of your past comments, and at first glance that can look like that there’s someone actively moderating or censoring the comments. There is not.

The spam filter is programmed to catch bots, and so if you post too fast after loading a page or too frequently within a small time-frame, it’ll think you’re a bot and will flag you. If you see that your comment has been marked for moderation, or if you get a message saying that you’ve been caught by the spam filter, don’t fret and try to repost it right away – that’ll just get all of your messages deleted automatically. The best way to rectify any comment problems is to email me with your username and email, and I’ll correct it immediately. Incidentally, I don’t plan on changing the spam filter anytime soon because it succeeds at catching 99.9% of the real spam, and there’s a ton of that.

20 Comments

  1. How about installing a better commenting system? Where people can reply to each other more easier and effectively? I don’t know though if such thing exists, there must be somewhere.

    lol
  2. As someone mentioned before, it’d be nice to not have “first”, “second”, or “third” posts… it’s just plain annoying that people boast how they’re so fast, yet don’t post anything valuable at all.

    Testament
  3. Lol, Testment. As soon as you post that, guess what the next post is xD
    “Ninth!”
    And yeah, Omni, you should keep that spam filter up – it doesn’t bother 99% of us, I’m sure :3

    iEatedyou
  4. Well, just about any system is gonna have it’s own set of false positives or negatives… it happens.

    And, all considered… I don’t think there *is* such a thing as a “better” comment system… at least, not one that involves either some massive network of servers and bandwidth, or registration, or something…

    cbhl
  5. To address the “first” problem:
    Unfortunately, if you visit any popular blog or site with comments enabled (Kotaku in particular comes to mind), that’s a common problem. And it’s not something that’s easily implementable/programmable for a spam filter to catch, so you’d need an active human moderator. Now I personally don’t approve of those kinds of comments either, but I also don’t have the time to moderate every post for them.

  6. you could just program a filter to not allow: 1-word posts that contain only the word “first/second/third/etc” (include various spellings of the word(s)). That wouldn’t be very hard. Many forums don’t allow “nt” posts for example. Which is along the same lines, basically checking to see how many words the post has.

    You could also use a voting system similar to Youtube allowing other people to + or – a post, or simply have only a “spam” option that would hide the “first” posts if enough people clicked on it.

    Cho Seno Ne
  7. Let me rephrase that: The spam filter I’m using is not easily modifiable like that, and the suggestions you’re making would require more time to implement than I have (aka. next to none after accounting for all the stuff I blog), especially the rating or flagging systems.

  8. …not to mention making the commenting system any less simpler / more complicated than it is atm will really cause more server failures on the backend, considering the load that will add ^^;;;;

    all the best with this Omni. I’m not really sure what spam filter you’re using, and I also don’t know if recommending this plugin will help (and/or increase server load), but here it is anyways: WP-SpamFree, to save you up some time in checking the spams caught by the spam-filter (since it already blocks comments by spambots).

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