Folks, for some reason the all powerful Spaminator has been registering a lot of false positives in the last few days. In other words, comments that are by real people are being identified as spam, and are not appearing on the blog. Can I ask people, if your comment doesn’t appear, to either be patient (as we don’t get email notifications of comments blocked as spam, so have to remember to check in periodically) or to email a moderator to alert them to the fact? Posting another comment such as “where’s my comment?” or attempting to repost the comment only compounds the problem as the programme interprets multiple posts in quick succession as further evidence of spam.
NB: As previously noted with regard to moderation issues, all the bloggers on this site have jobs and lives outside the blogosphere, so unfortunately, if I’m away from my computer or busy, I can’t guarentee an instant response to any issues that may arise.
The machine is turning on its human masters!!
[HAL9000] “I can’t allow you to post that Dave” [/HAL9000]
It’s really weird, Cliff. It performed totally reliably for a long time and I can’t figure out the logic of which comments it’s now picking up as spam - including many made by regular posters and LP bloggers themselves.
It moderated my comment towards the end of the “Cartoons” thread but I naturally assumed that you despised me and thought no more of it.
Ha!
Anyway it’s an equal opportunity nuisance at the moment - it blocks comments by LWLBs and RWDBs alike!
I was just thinking about something that is related to this post… “survival of the fittest post” is at work on this site - where fitness is gauged by other peoples interest to comment.
Multitudes of posts compete with each other to be in the top 12 of most recently commented-on-posts, and the forgotten ones just fall by the wayside, only to be remembered if they fall into their very own niche (eg, “is missy higgins a lesbian?”).
I wonder if anyone has looked at this?
…and the spaminator is like a disease!