Are your comments being eaten? (updated)

I’m getting reports that my blog is eating some people’s comments. Could you let me know if this is happening to you and exactly what it was my blog would not let you post. Preferably by way of the comments. But if that’s not working:

jlATjustinelarbalestierDOTcom

To make the address work substitute @ for AT and . for DOT

So far it seems to have something to do with posting HTML and URLS.

Thanks!

And if any wordpress users have had this happen to them and have solutions—fire away! I have nothing blacklisted.

Update: I’ve been trawling through the spam filters and found quite a few comments which I’ve now marked as non-spam. Please let me know if my spam filters eat your comments and I will set them free!

Posted by Justine at 10:40, 10 November 2007 under Admin | 22 Comments »

Comments

Patrick Says:

I’ve had it happen from my office computer. Same thing happens over on Scalzi’s site. he looked into it and it turned out that I was going into a spam filter or something like that.

Apparently my large secure corporate network is listed as a spam source. Kinda funny, if you ask me.

November 10th, 2007 at 11:33 AM
Patrick, from my corporate computer which is likely to not get posted!!! Says:

See, if this gets posted, I’d be pretty surprised.

November 10th, 2007 at 11:37 AM
Patrick Says:

There. I just logged into my company computer and it let me post, but did not show up.

hope that helps.

November 10th, 2007 at 11:38 AM
Patrick Says:

ooh, it did show up this time.

November 10th, 2007 at 11:39 AM
5. Justine Says:

Patrick: I dug your second third and fourth comments out of the spam filter. Let me know if you can post from your office computer from now on. Thanks!

November 10th, 2007 at 11:40 AM
Patrick Says:

3rd and 4th too? Those were from my home comp. Strange.

November 10th, 2007 at 11:45 AM
Patrick, from my corporate computer which is likely to not get posted!!! Says:

Let’s see if this pops up without hitting a filter.

can you tell I am a computer geek who likes testing things?

November 10th, 2007 at 11:47 AM
8. Justine Says:

I have a feeling once it’s decided you’re spam it nukes all patricks! But hopefully the spam stain has been lifted.

November 10th, 2007 at 11:53 AM
Patrick Says:

I have one sitting in the filter again from my corporate…

November 10th, 2007 at 12:03 PM
10. Justine Says:

Stupid spam flter! I go gets it.

November 10th, 2007 at 12:04 PM
Patrick Says:

I guess I’m fortunate in that I can work from two different networks, so I can say when I am caught.

November 10th, 2007 at 12:07 PM
12. Justine Says:

Thanks for letting me know and for testing it! Most people don’t mention the comment disappearage.

November 10th, 2007 at 12:13 PM
zebediah Says:

it’s my birthday!!!!!!!

November 10th, 2007 at 1:20 PM
Patrick Says:

HAPPy birthday!

I know i’ve never mentioned lost posts because I rarely type anything so important that it is worth saving from the spam filter.

It’s sort of like blurting something out in the classroom, only to have the teacher say, please raise your hand if you have something to say.

November 10th, 2007 at 2:51 PM
Lizzy-wa Says:

HAPPY B-DAY ZEBEDIAH! (that was supposed to be in all caps but justine-la stole all of the capitals. hehe. im funny-making.

hehe. thats funny. patrick-la and justine-la are just chatting away for like 45 minutes. hehe. funny.

oh yeah! um. let me think. let me think. nope! ive never been eaten before.

-Lizzy-wa OUT!

November 10th, 2007 at 3:02 PM
kim Says:

i don’t think that i have been eaten on you blog before justine.
i think that i have on barnes and nobel, though.

November 10th, 2007 at 3:20 PM
shloopy Says:

I think I’ve had a comment eaten once, but my computer was probably the problem. As soon as I sent the comment, my window hesitated a second too long before responding, and i suddenly said “oh crap!” because I knew my computer was going down. Sure enough, my computer gave me the lovely message that said: ‘Safari has quit unexpectedly… blah blah…’ And, of course, i had wondows open that i didn’t bookmark…

I tried again and it has worked fine ever since.

November 10th, 2007 at 5:53 PM
Malcolm Tredinnick Says:

Justine, are you also using aksimet’s spam plugin? It ships by default with wordpress, but you would have had to set up a key for it in the admin screen (under the plugins menu) at some point for it to work. That might be hijacking some comments, particularly based on what people are saying here (more problems from public terminals, problems with posts with lots of links, etc).

What should be happening (without akismet) is that once you approve a comment from somebody, they are auto-approved in future on the grounds of being a good soul, full of caring and light. Things like akisment (or any other spam plugin you might have in wp-content/plugins/) will run before the native wordpress checks, though.

Your last post, about stuff on our desks, was the sort of thing that I wouldn’t be too surprised seeing a lot of comments get caught. Not sure what the solution is there, if akismet really does think they’re all spam (aside from boring manual moderation).

November 10th, 2007 at 8:41 PM
19. Justine Says:

Have been using Askimet for ages. But have only recently had complaints abotu disappearing comments.

If people let me know it’s trivial digging them out.

November 10th, 2007 at 8:42 PM
Corey Says:

I swear I put one on the ‘cleaning desk’ one that I no longer see. I guess I’ll just post this here and see if that shows as well…I fear your blog may have realized I switched from running wordpress to running blogspot and is getting back at me…

November 11th, 2007 at 3:23 PM
Robin L Says:

WordPress has an option that allows you to tell it to hold comments for moderation that have [X] number of hyperlinks in them. If the majority of missing comments have links or html, maybe it’s getting confused.

You can change the settings by going to the Option menu on the dashboard, then Discussion. Towards the bottom is the place where you can set parameters for links on incoming comments.

That’s the only thing I can think of…

November 12th, 2007 at 5:26 PM
22. Justine Says:

The comments weren’t being affected by moderation they were being nuked by askimet. All I can do is hope that people will tell me when their comments disappear so that I can rescue them from askimet and thus train it not to nuke non-spam.

November 12th, 2007 at 5:29 PM