Already Checked Your Spam Comments Today?

You haven’t? Not good because it means that you might have missed some interesting comments that your spam filter mistakingly put there. What makes me think so? Personal experience as a matter of fact. For the past couple of weeks, whenever I tried to post a comment on a wordpress blog using my wordpress ID, I just jumped to the top of the page and nothing else happened. None of my comments ever appeared on the page, neither at once, nor any time later.

As you can imagine, this was terribly annoying and I had no idea what was wrong. I changed my wordpress passwords, checked my settings – all to no avail. I googled the problem to see if others were affected too and yes, there were many who complained about not being able to comment. However, I didn't find out why it happened right away. Only after a new research I learnt that the wordpress spam filter is kind of rigid. I asked the owners of two of the blogs where I had tried my luck several times, if – by any chance – my comments were in their spam folders: they were in fact!

I still can't explain myself why my comments go straight to the spam folders. I've never been very active discussing on other blogs simply because I don't have the time and I never write anything off-topic. Until recently, I hardly ever included links either – as far as I remember. And yet, the filter labels my comments as spam. That's just the way it is. Unfortunately, to know what is happening to my comments is one thing, to solve the problem is another because there seems to be nothing that I can actually do about it.

It's not in my hand to tell the spam filter that my comments are okay, but it's up to every blogger to "unspam" them, publish them, so the system can learn and will cease to put them into the spam folder right away.

Since I'm surely not the only one who is prevented from commenting on other blogs by a rigid spam fllter, I wonder how many interesting remarks are getting lost every day. Without doubt, never seeing their comments published anywhere will discourage many readers to the point of giving up commenting for good. And who knows if the various difficulties of successfully leaving a comment on a blog aren't the true reason why we book bloggers get so few reactions to our posts...