Overactive spam filter?
Lately my spam filter seems to have occasionally been classifying perfectly normal comments from regular commenters as spam, for no apparent reason. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s been happening slightly more than usual. I try to catch it, but I don’t always succeed.
So if you have a comment that doesn’t appear after you post it, please let me know so I can rescue it.
Neo has been very fast in responding to commenters’ complaints about bad spam classification. Try communicating about bad spam with Disqus clients. For example consider Disqus client Instapundit- impossible, as far as I can tell, to communicate with them regarding bad spam classification. Instapundit informs you that “we are working on getting this corrected,” but Instapundit never does correct false spam detection, as far as I can tell.
At least most Disqus clients do pass through subsequent comments. However, The Atlantic, formerly a Disqus client, once you had been flagged for spam, stopped all subsequent comments. As I got flagged for too many links- as far as I can tell- for a comment about Norwegian oil policy, that was an absurd policy. I wasn’t surprised that The Atlantic subsequently stopped all comments.
As Disqus flags you for such things as too many ( >2?) edits, too many links (> 1?) or too long writing a comment, it is very easy for a pedantic comment to get false spam reading.
Neo’s system isn’t perfect, but it’s a lot better than Disqus, which filters a substantial proportion of blogosphere comments. In addition, Neo is much more responsive than most Disqus clients.
Does Disqus also handle Blogspot? I’ve been getting multiple weird “prove you’re not a robot” images which I have to click through to comment both at PowerLine and another site on Blogspot. And I seldom post links. Maybe there’s an industry-wide anti-spam effort going on.
As to Instapundit, the volume there is so huge that policing spam would probably be impossible, and there it is.
As to Instapundit, the volume there is so huge that policing spam would probably be impossible, and there it is.
Probably so. I would like to know precisely what it is from my admittedly pedantic comments that triggers the spam filter, so I could avoid the spam filter. Disqus is set up for one-liner, pithy comments. It doesn’t handle longer,more pedantic comments very well.
When on occasion I have been able to communicate with writers of Disqus filtered articles regarding what it is in my comment that triggered the spam filter, the answer is invariably like this:
Sometimes the writer of the article also expresses frustration with Disqus.
I usually post short comments. I don’t know if that helps.
Kate
Does Disqus also handle Blogspot? I’ve been getting multiple weird “prove you’re not a robot” images which I have to click through to comment both at PowerLine and another site on Blogspot.
I don’t know about Blogspot per se, but Disqus does handle Powerline. I would rather have to click through “prove you’re not a robot” than have my comment spammed.
Disqus is a pimple on the backside of the Internet. “There! I said it!”
I have no idea why anybody who has at least a subset of readers who leave substantive comments would ever sign up with Dreadful Disqus — which kills all comments more than three months (I think it is) old.
There is a wealth of useful information in the archived comments of the better websites — such as this one.
The fact that people do leave worthwhile comments that won’t be lost should be recognized by website owners as constituting a great advertisement for their sites.
I will never, ever waste my time leaving comments through Disqus.
. . .
I wonder whether there comes a time when a website’s owner becomes first a news-aggregator and a magazine publisher and ends up being a backer and/or administrator more than a writer and producer of material. One such is FPM, where David Horowitz (of whom I’m a fan) now disclaims direct knowledge of the pieces FPM publishes, unless some sort of stir is created.
Gringo – a couple of work-arounds I use, if I think about it.
Long posts & time outs: compose in Word and copy/paste.
Links: strip the https and www and post in “clear” with instructions to insert the missing parts, but you don’t really need them if you search for all the key words in the link.
Dropping old comments on Disqus I did not know about, but I don’t leave many outside of Neo’s pixel salon. A problem I have noted is that I can’t “link” directly to a comment on PowerLine; I just get the entire blog again.
They do have some interesting commenters, and I pick up lots of graphics there.
I left HotAir when they went to Facebook comments, and most of what they have now is spam (not filtered: go there if you want to learn how to Make Money at Home Fast), and only about 4-10 comments per post instead of the long discussions with reality-based expertise that we get here (although Hoyt is the champion for length, every daily post tops 200 easy with water-cooler chit-chat and sometimes useful info).
NOTE to Neo: I don’t always get the Edit button on a comment, usually on the ones where I notice a typo or infelicitous phrasing just after pressing “post”.