To all commenters: Your words are not junk.

I'm not enough of a geek to know exactly what to do about this, but this blog is having more and more of a problem with legitimate comments being junked. They are automatically being sent to the "junk comments" folder, where they are easily lost among the many actual junk comments which are generated by bots and thus constantly pour in.

What is happening is that over time, the more spam comments there are, the more the anti-spam software tends to treat legitimate comments as spam. It reminds me of an immune system disease-spotting process gone awry. This software is supposed to discriminate in an intelligent manner between good comments and junk comments, but it seems that as the spam comment robots get better and better at circumventing it, and as their sheer volume increases, the more ordinary comments tend to be seen as junk.

It is, simply, infuriating. I don't want to have to spend my time searching and reading through piles of junk to track down ordinary comments that were mistakenly placed there, but for the umpteenth effing time, this morning I did, and I "resurrected" dozens of comments left on a variety of posts.

The reason for this post is simply to let commenters know that I am sorry this has been happening, and that while I'm trying, I don't know whether I can totally solve this problem. For a while, even my own comments and M. Simon's comments were getting junked, so I know it's really bad. Unfortunately, so is the spam. The solution might be to upgrade the blog's software; right now it's MovableType, version 3.2 (at least I think that's the version). I've been advised to move to WordPad, but I dread the possibility of glitches with archives, and I refuse to do anything which might make old links inoperable as I think dead links make a blog look flaky. (But then, so do disappearing comments.)

The bottom line is that if you have left comments but they didn't appear, please don't take it personally. You are not being banned or discriminated against by anyone here. By their actions, the spammmers are responsible for a process that is slowly, inexorably causing human dialogue to be treated as junk. (I'd hurt them if I could, but I don't know how.)

I'm of course open to advice, and I am willing to pay to have this problem solved.

My goal of course is to write blog posts, not spend my time messing with software and coding issues.

posted by Eric on 07.16.09 at 10:26 AM





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