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However what you don't mention, and I think is far more likely scenario, is that a spam filter gives people plausible deniability for deleting a comment from their site. It's awkward to say "I didn't like your comment" so people just blame it on the computer third-party. This used to really confuse me, as people who had been "blocked" would contact Akismet and we deeply investigate every reported FP, but the logs were showing that they weren't ever marked as spam.
However what you don't mention, and I think is far more likely scenario, is that a spam filter gives people plausible deniability for deleting a comment from their site. It's awkward to say "I didn't like your comment" so people just blame it on the computer third-party. This used to really confuse me, as people who had been "blocked" would contact Akismet and we deeply investigate every reported FP, but the logs were showing that they weren't ever marked as spam.
Why would I notice specific things such as providing a deeper link through to more relevant content, or making a longer comment affect my ability to escape the moderation queue?
There are advantages to collective intelligence, and I did query how much weighting is transferred.
Since the beginning of December I have tracked approximately 450 comments I have made in various places. I would estimate 100 to 150 of those are on Wordpress installations running Akismet.
I would estimate that of those comments less than 5 have not appeared after a period of time, yet I still have comments that hit the moderation queue on blogs where I have previously commented without problems, and it seems extremely erratic.
I am referring to fresh posts, no links in the body of the comment, and comments of a reasonable length that as far as I am aware didn't contain words that might trip up filters.
With that amount of comment history I would expect the collective intelligence to now be working in my favor, allowing me to include a link in a comment even on sites such as Darren's, or to be able to write a 500+ word comment without it going in the moderation queue.
Please forgive my lack of faith in filters that rely on global databases, but having spent a lot of time trying to train Gmail into allowing the email I want to get to me, false positives are a major sticking point.
I expect problems on a first comment, or maybe a comment to an older post, but not to new posts on blogs where my comments are always accepted.
Why would I notice specific things such as providing a deeper link through to more relevant content, or making a longer comment affect my ability to escape the moderation queue?
There are advantages to collective intelligence, and I did query how much weighting is transferred.
Since the beginning of December I have tracked approximately 450 comments I have made in various places. I would estimate 100 to 150 of those are on Wordpress installations running Akismet.
I would estimate that of those comments less than 5 have not appeared after a period of time, yet I still have comments that hit the moderation queue on blogs where I have previously commented without problems, and it seems extremely erratic.
I am referring to fresh posts, no links in the body of the comment, and comments of a reasonable length that as far as I am aware didn't contain words that might trip up filters.
With that amount of comment history I would expect the collective intelligence to now be working in my favor, allowing me to include a link in a comment even on sites such as Darren's, or to be able to write a 500+ word comment without it going in the moderation queue.
Please forgive my lack of faith in filters that rely on global databases, but having spent a lot of time trying to train Gmail into allowing the email I want to get to me, false positives are a major sticking point.
I expect problems on a first comment, or maybe a comment to an older post, but not to new posts on blogs where my comments are always accepted.
From what I remember, on comments on Problogger they just don't appear if they have hit a hurdle.
With Spam Karma, comments that almost pass end up in the normal moderation queue, and I thought that was the same with Akismet
From what I remember, on comments on Problogger they just don't appear if they have hit a hurdle.
With Spam Karma, comments that almost pass end up in the normal moderation queue, and I thought that was the same with Akismet
Suggesting that Akismet isn't to blame for the false positives and that the comments were just deleted seems pretty suspicious to me considering that just recently I was being blocked from Scoble's blog - where he doesn't delete comments that criticise him, nor were my comments critical - and you investigated the problem and resolved it. Further, a collegue of mine who uses Akismet confirmed that it marked all of my comments on his blog as spam. See http://www.symphonious.net/2007/02/02/scoble-yo...
Also, Akismet may be separate to moderation, but if Akismet marks something as spam and later the site owner recovers the comment, it looks as if the comment has been held in moderation, which is what Andy has most likely been seeing.
Finally, Andy the "Post" button for comments does nothing in NetNewsWire (uses the Safari rendering engine).
Suggesting that Akismet isn't to blame for the false positives and that the comments were just deleted seems pretty suspicious to me considering that just recently I was being blocked from Scoble's blog - where he doesn't delete comments that criticise him, nor were my comments critical - and you investigated the problem and resolved it. Further, a collegue of mine who uses Akismet confirmed that it marked all of my comments on his blog as spam. See http://www.symphonious.net/2007/02/02/scoble-yo...
Also, Akismet may be separate to moderation, but if Akismet marks something as spam and later the site owner recovers the comment, it looks as if the comment has been held in moderation, which is what Andy has most likely been seeing.
Finally, Andy the "Post" button for comments does nothing in NetNewsWire (uses the Safari rendering engine).
Thanks for stopping by - Robert's is another blog that most of the time my comments appear without problem, yet sometimes they don't.
I don't chase Robert over it, because he has enough to deal with. Robert definitely doesn't delete critical comments, and I have racked up a couple.
In fact one fairly serious comment didn't get through Akismet, even without a link, and I just made sure I included the warning in a later followup comment. Who knows the potential harm to the thread of discussion that missed comment made.
Maybe coComment integration is causing a problem, I will try switching off - note you may have to visit my comments policy sometime soon to place comments here - just working out the code to enforce people at least view it once.
Thanks for stopping by - Robert's is another blog that most of the time my comments appear without problem, yet sometimes they don't.
I don't chase Robert over it, because he has enough to deal with. Robert definitely doesn't delete critical comments, and I have racked up a couple.
In fact one fairly serious comment didn't get through Akismet, even without a link, and I just made sure I included the warning in a later followup comment. Who knows the potential harm to the thread of discussion that missed comment made.
Maybe coComment integration is causing a problem, I will try switching off - note you may have to visit my comments policy sometime soon to place comments here - just working out the code to enforce people at least view it once.
If you think a comment has been caught, just email the person and ask them to submit it as a false positive if it was caught. It's not personal, and it probably has very little to do with what you do (number of links, etc) and far more to do with what spammers are doing. (Remember only 6% of the comments we process are legit.)
If you think a comment has been caught, just email the person and ask them to submit it as a false positive if it was caught. It's not personal, and it probably has very little to do with what you do (number of links, etc) and far more to do with what spammers are doing. (Remember only 6% of the comments we process are legit.)
My first step toward a solution to that problem is this plugin, which notifies users when their comments are moderated or put into the spam bin. When something goes into the spam bin, I immediately shoot them a note that encourages them to contact me and ask me to rescue their comment.
The next thing I'm considering is a plugin that goes through all comments marked as spam and deletes the really obvious spam. Akismet is an imperial "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" decision, so there's no way to separate the SPAM from the maybe-spam. If I could eliminate 80% of the spam log on sight, I might be able to skim the Akismet spam log for false positives.
Even a simple blacklist (perhaps making the built-in WP blacklist delete caught comments instead of putting them in the spam bin) would likely help.
My first step toward a solution to that problem is this plugin, which notifies users when their comments are moderated or put into the spam bin. When something goes into the spam bin, I immediately shoot them a note that encourages them to contact me and ask me to rescue their comment.
The next thing I'm considering is a plugin that goes through all comments marked as spam and deletes the really obvious spam. Akismet is an imperial "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" decision, so there's no way to separate the SPAM from the maybe-spam. If I could eliminate 80% of the spam log on sight, I might be able to skim the Akismet spam log for false positives.
Even a simple blacklist (perhaps making the built-in WP blacklist delete caught comments instead of putting them in the spam bin) would likely help.
Even when people fill in my captcha they often still end up in the moderation queue, but it is very rare that I have to pull comments from the black list in Spam Karma. The worst is when someone pre-prepares a comment, pastes it in, it gets caught because they have not been on the page long enough, and then they write another comment saying "I left a comment but it was caught by your filter" - I have had some weird database bugs when people have managed to get their personal domain banned.
Even when people fill in my captcha they often still end up in the moderation queue, but it is very rare that I have to pull comments from the black list in Spam Karma. The worst is when someone pre-prepares a comment, pastes it in, it gets caught because they have not been on the page long enough, and then they write another comment saying "I left a comment but it was caught by your filter" - I have had some weird database bugs when people have managed to get their personal domain banned.
However, after a while I tired of scanning the Akismet queue, so I partially re-enabled it. Since I don't want to be snagged for links, here's the unlinked URL:
http://developedtraffic.com/2007/02/11/wordpres...
There are links to the full post about the word blocker in the post.
However, after a while I tired of scanning the Akismet queue, so I partially re-enabled it. Since I don't want to be snagged for links, here's the unlinked URL:
http://developedtraffic.com/2007/02/11/wordpres...
There are links to the full post about the word blocker in the post.
The content of comments here doesn't affect what gets through unless you go crazy. I think I set the penalty low for links, and only if there are more than 4 links in the content.
There are actually plugins available that use Akismet as a variable in their overall calculations, rather than as a sole judge.
That little hack might be useful to block some of the spam but I like being able to write
[code]a little bit of code in my comments[/code]
The content of comments here doesn't affect what gets through unless you go crazy. I think I set the penalty low for links, and only if there are more than 4 links in the content.
There are actually plugins available that use Akismet as a variable in their overall calculations, rather than as a sole judge.
That little hack might be useful to block some of the spam but I like being able to write
[code]a little bit of code in my comments[/code]
I'd noticed that much comment spam contains both normal links and BB code links, I just thought blocking the BB code for URLs would stop an awful lot of it from being posted in the first place. But that "word blocker" doesn't block normal HTML links.
I hadn't considered wanting to write BB code in comments, since those don't work on my blogs.
I'd noticed that much comment spam contains both normal links and BB code links, I just thought blocking the BB code for URLs would stop an awful lot of it from being posted in the first place. But that "word blocker" doesn't block normal HTML links.
I hadn't considered wanting to write BB code in comments, since those don't work on my blogs.
I found the Comment Guard WP plugin by accident, and have it running on my blog right now. I am very positive with my experience so far, and have had great support from Angsuman with some technical problems. Read about it here:
http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/word...
It is now in beta, but I think it is quite easy to get in to the program.
I found the Comment Guard WP plugin by accident, and have it running on my blog right now. I am very positive with my experience so far, and have had great support from Angsuman with some technical problems. Read about it here:
http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/word...
It is now in beta, but I think it is quite easy to get in to the program.
Just a though, do a "fake" comment form that is read only input where the real form should be that clearly indicates the comment policy info -- that will make it jump out.
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on to my comment!
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One thing I'd *really* like Akismet to start doing is be "less binary". I'd like to more easily ignore the stuff that is guaranteed spam and focus on reviewing the stuff that may or may not be spam.
Just a though, do a "fake" comment form that is read only input where the real form should be that clearly indicates the comment policy info -- that will make it jump out.
---
on to my comment!
---
One thing I'd *really* like Akismet to start doing is be "less binary". I'd like to more easily ignore the stuff that is guaranteed spam and focus on reviewing the stuff that may or may not be spam.
I didn't intend to implement it as quickly, but some manual spam managed to get emailed to some comment subscribers. It will become slightly more streamlined, especially for posts that already have quite a few comments.
I didn't intend to implement it as quickly, but some manual spam managed to get emailed to some comment subscribers. It will become slightly more streamlined, especially for posts that already have quite a few comments.
That might be the source of my problems... I'm a very fast commenter :)
I wrote a piece for Lorelle On WordPress where I talked about two things you can do if Akismet is always marking your own comments as spam.
http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2007/09/25/help-ak...
I am actually quite sick of Akismet, because I haven't got time to monitor every blog I link to to see if a trackback was pulled out of the sin bin.
It happened recently on Scobleizer again, and he didn't know I was part of the "conversation"
Hmm... is Akismet sending email addresses to Akismet.com?
That might be the source of my problems... I'm a very fast commenter :)
I wrote a piece for Lorelle On WordPress where I talked about two things you can do if Akismet is always marking your own comments as spam.
http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2007/09/25/help-ak...
I am actually quite sick of Akismet, because I haven't got time to monitor every blog I link to to see if a trackback was pulled out of the sin bin.
It happened recently on Scobleizer again, and he didn't know I was part of the "conversation"
Hmm... is Akismet sending email addresses to Akismet.com?