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.