Mind Renewers

I’ve just added the following to the comment policy, but since my regular readers probably don’t check that every day, 🙂 I wanted to draw your attention to it.

NOTE: If your comment does not appear within a day or two, please contact me. It may have been buried in the spam filter and be retrievable.   (This is less likely to happen if your comment does not contain more than one link and is longer than two words.)

WordPress provides the Akismet spam filter, which is very effective, but occasionally legitimate comments, even from frequent participants, get thrown into the spam filter.

I no longer have time to check for these.  As blog traffic has grown, so has the spam.  I used to check 40-50 spam comments a day, but now it is more than 10 times that every single day, sometimes much more even than that.  I can’t keep up.  I’ll now clear it using mass deletions without even checking them.

But I’ll never delete spam until it is several days old.  So if your comment doesn’t appear within a day or two, drop me a note, and I’ll go find it — it won’t take long if I know for what I’m looking.

Some bloggers disable comments, which certainly does solve the problem.  I would rather use mass deletions and risk losing a legitimate comment occasionally rather than shut down comments entirely.

I value comments greatly, even if they don’t agree entirely with what I’ve written.  I’ve learned from comments.  Reader comments have led to a new post, or even a series of posts.  They may let me know I’ve been unclear.  They also encourage me.  I don’t in any way want to discourage comments.  But I want to have time to read the real comments and spend blog-time actually writing rather than simply sorting through spam. 🙂 So please help me by understanding and simply contacting me if you comment and it goes missing.