Oh and then the former state AG(now in a new elected position) apparently technorati searches for his name every morning.

But spam, I am spared so far. It’s bad enough in email. More and more seems to get past the filter systems.

Even just discussing knitting, I get a lot. To help keep the load down, I use spamkarma with the askismet plugin. Spamkarma rates the spam and just deletes a lot of it. It also gives positive karma point to people who have posted comments before. So, regulars are unlikely to be blocked.

If you add the akismet plugin, the borderline stuff is sent on the akismet. So, you still get the akismet function but don’t need to look at quite so much stuff. I also use badbehavior to keep the number of ‘bot off the site.

But, yes, what a pain.

You can go to this Web site to find more information on issues with blogger comments.

Status of Blogger’s comments

One way to get around it is to just ignore the empty word-verification box and just press publish. When it comes up again, your message should still be there and hopefully the symbols will be also. Keep doing this a couple times and most of the time the word verification symbols should come up.

So, akismet hated me but now we’re all, like, best buds.

I have a very, very low-traffic blog that’s been up not quite two years. I routinely get over a thousand spams a day, and lately it’s been close to 2,000. Akismet gets virtually all of them, and sometimes puts a handful into moderation. Maybe 1/10 of 1% actually get onto the comments threads (where they are often the only comment!). I don’t know what its false-positive rate is because there are simply too many spams to review, but after reviewing the first few thousand and never finding a false positive, I finally stopped worrying about it.

Akismet is certainly a god-send (or is that “fate-send”, given the name?). But I’m shocked to hear you’re getting “only” a few hundred spams on a blog as visible and long-running as this.

My “solution” to the being-blocked problem was to stop linking my website(s) in my little name thingy there. Then it lets my comments through.

Hey Amp - didn’t there used to be a “Your comment is awaiting moderation” message? I keep making an ass of myself :(

No, I keep making an ass of you - but it’s not intentional.

For some reason, the Akismet spam-blocker thinks you’re spam. I have no idea that your posts have been caught by Akismet until you mention it in comments; once you mention in comments that you’ve had posts disappear, I go into the Akismet folder and find and rescue your comments.

So that’s why your comments aren’t appearing until after you’ve publicly said “well, my comment has been eaten.” Sorry ’bout that.