Chronicle Comments: Spam Or Not
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.
Dave, one part of the picture I’d emphasize is the major problem that website spam has become. We’re all aware of spam when it arrives in our email inbox, but only those who maintain websites know the extent to which comment and registration forms have also turned into spam magnets. Readers should understand that it’s nearly impossible to fend off all the bad guys and let through all the good guys with 100% accuracy, unless you have the wherewithal to assign a human being to manually review every submission.
Did you reset the “approved” lists? It appears that a recent post of mine is being held for moderation.
Re: resetting of “approved” lists
We haven’t re-set anything. To be honest, I’m not sure what that whitelist is keyed to — I assumed IP address, but maybe that’s wrong.
In any case, that comment has been set free and is visible here.
Today I retrieved another legitimate comment from the spam folder as the result of a reader inquiry.
A question I had recently about comments here: Will you allow the commenter to delete a comment? So far there is no way to do that and I took a chance one time with a comment and wondered if I could remove it later. I reworded my comment and thought I could live with it if I was wrong in my assumption. Anyway, I just wondered if you will allow that in the future, or maybe not because the “conversation” gets confusing if one is suddenly deleted.
Anyway just a thought.
To users to delete their own comments, you need people to sign in somehow, so that only the person who left the comment has the privileges to delete it.
Pretty much all blogs have no comment delete option. If you want something deleted, you have to write to the webmaster and ask nicely.
Spam-filtering and whitelisting (comment approval) are two separate functions in the software running this site (WordPress).
Spam-filtering is done by Akismet, a web-service that tests the comment against its large set of rules and gives it a thumbs up or thumbs down. If Akismet flags a comment as spam, all subsequent comments made from the same IP address are automatically flagged as spam. Comments flagged as spam go into a queue that can be checked by the website administrator for false positives (legitimate comments incorrectly flagged as spam). False positives released from the queue by the website administrator are sent forward in the publishing process. Additionally, a copy of the false positive is sent to Akismet to help it learn not to flag similar comments as spam going forward.
Note also that Akismet is a global service that examines millions of comments every day from many different sources. For that reason, you’re more likely to have a comment incorrectly flagged as spam when you post from publicly-accessible IP addresses (libraries, coffee shops, etc.). Many comments are made from those IP addresses, which increases the likelihood that someone using one of those IP address before you has made a comment which Akismet has flagged as spam, thus flagging all subsequent comments from that IP address – including yours – as spam.
WordPress’s whitelisting feature is based on user-submitted email addresses. Whenever WordPress sees a comment from a new email address, the comment is held in a queue for review by the website administrator. If the website administrator releases the comment from the queue, WordPress records the email address. Future comments from the email address bypass the queue and are posted on the website immediately.
Note that the Akismet spam-flagging process is executed before the WordPress whitelisting process. Even if the website administrator has already approved your email address and placed it in the whitelist, your comment can be flagged as spam by Akismet.
[The above is based on my admittedly limited understanding of Akismet and WordPress functionality. Caveat emptor.]