Spam is still spam, even when it's wrapped with a bow.

We take this occasion to address some technical issues related to commenting on Chronicle articles, prompted by a bad outcome this past weekend. In general, everyone’s very first comment is held in a moderation queue – this helps cut down on spam. Time lag for approval of a first comment ranges from instantaneous (if it’s seen “live” as it comes through) to a few hours. After logging one successful comment, subsequent comments should appear with no editorial intervention.

There’s an anti-spam filter that runs over the top of everything, which means that some comments never make it into the moderation queue. In the first month of operation, we inspected the comments analyzed as spam and determined that Akismet (the spam filter) had analyzed something like 500 items with 100% accuracy: no false positives and no spam comments submitted for moderation. At that point we stopped checking its performance.

However, over the weekend we encountered a case where a reader attempted to leave a comment, but after hitting the “Submit” button, nothing happened. That reader emailed us to inquire. We rummaged around in the spam folder, found her comment, and de-spammed it. That’s all well and good for that reader.

But in four months time, we allow for the possibility this isn’t the first time a legitimate comment has been mis-analyzed as spam, even if it’s the first time a reader has called our attention to it. Our apologies if this has happened to you.

So if The Chronicle does not respond to a comment submission by adding it to the site immediately, or alerting you to the fact that it’s being held for moderation, please let us know. It’s likely a technical glitch. More information on how comments are handled can be found in The Chronicle’s commenting policy.