comments

You are currently browsing articles tagged comments.

On comment spam

December 8, 2018 in problems | Permalink

We had a temporary plague of comment spam here. My original post here remarked on that.

But it’s gone now, so its safe to comment again. 🙂

Thanks for bearing with me in the meantime.

Tags: , ,

The hell of comments

January 28, 2014 in Blogging, problems | 5 comments

So I wanted to add a comment under essay “Lena Dunham Is The New John Updike — But Not In A Good Way“, in WBUR‘s Cognoscenti ‘zine (which I just discovered, and I like). So I wrote a caution about throwing out both Dunham’s and Updike’s babies in the bathwaters of their narcissm (as defined originally, for Updike, in this David Foster Wallace review of Updike’s late-in-life work). When I finished, I was presented with this:

First I picked Disqus (the one on the left), but it didn’t work. Then I picked Twitter. That didn’t work. (It flashed a small page that said “Redirecting you back to the application,” plus some other stuff that disappeared before I could read it.) Then I started writing in a name, and new fields opened up:

These were also unproductive, even when I used my known Disqus name, email and password. (The question mark with a circle produces a summary of Disqus’ policies, terms and conditions.) Then I made the mistake of clicking on a link somewhere and lost what I had written.

While it’s great, I suppose, that Disqus, Facebook, Twitter and Google provide handy shortcuts — “social” logins through their APIs — the whole non-system also fails so often that at best it comprises (entrepreneur alert:::) an opportunity for some new approach.

That’s why I keep going back to the oldest and perhaps the least complicated way to post a comment, which is on a publication of one’s own. So that’s what I’m doing here. (With a bonus complaint. 🙂 )

Tags: , ,

Spamnation

April 25, 2010 in Blogging | 8 comments

Here’s what I see at the top of my WordPress dashboard:

At a Glance

1,374 Posts 10,720 Comments
3 Pages 8,013 Approved
38 Categories 69 Pending
1,476 Tags 2,637 Spam

Akismet has protected your site from 266,660 spam comments already, and there are 2,637 comments in your spam queue right now.

Well, a lot of those spam comments have worked their way past Akismet lately, and I’ve had to kill them off manually. Most of them are obvious, but many are not, and seeing whether or not those are real takes time. So, between the tide of spam and the time it takes to sort through the whole mess, a number of legitimate comments haven’t been approved right away. To right that wrong, I just went back through 75 pages of comments and approved about twenty amidst perhaps hundreds of spams. Most of those approved were for old postings. My apologies about that.

The way the system here works, if you’ve already made an approved comment, your future comments are automatically approved. It’s only first-timers that get stuck in the moderation queue with all the spam. I’ll try to be better about looking for comments beyond the first page in the queue listing, when the first page (and the second, third and so on) is mostly spam.

If you make a comment that doesn’t appear, write to me. My email address is my first name at my last name, dot com.

Tags: , , ,